Six Fuyo Group companies found a leasing house around Marubeni and Fuji Bank (1969)

Housing two resources in one company

Marubeni-Iida stood at the centre of the joint investment, and Fuji Bank’s stake was merely one 8% holding among several — the later shorthand of a “bank-affiliated leasing company” makes this starting point hard to see. What Fuyo General Lease assembled was two resources, neither sufficient alone: the long-term funding needed to keep buying equipment, and the sales network needed to place it. In a business that runs on an equity ratio of 3.3%, having a major bank as a shareholder was a precondition of staying funded; and the industry figure that 45.3% of purchases came through shareholder trading houses shows that the trader was no nominal investor.

Yet setting two heads side by side did not by itself make the company strong. While Fuji Bank’s president Iwasa Yoshizane said that the bank was strictly a supporting player, contemporaries also noted that a bank in a hurry to internationalize and a trading house that already had an overseas network differed in how badly each needed foreign partners — two parents with divergent interests, a structure that required constant adjustment. That some thirty years later Fuyo found itself on the consolidating side, absorbing three Fuyo-affiliated lessors, and that Marubeni and Mizuho Bank both remain on the share register today, can be read as the result of never abandoning that adjustment.