Company history

In December 1969 the Industrial Bank of Japan gathered fifteen other companies — industrial firms and life insurers representing a cross-section of Japanese business — and together they put up ¥500 million to found Pacific Lease in Tokyo. The leasing industry association had been formed with eight members only five months earlier, and Orient Lease (now Orix), founded in 1964, was still doing the work of introducing the country to the product. IBJ could have entered alone. It chose not to, and the reason was the customer list: the breadth of the shareholder register is the breadth of the deal flow, and sixteen sets of corporate relationships gave the new company a customer base that no single bank could match.

Construction-machinery and ship leasing began in 1972; in November 1981 the name changed to IBJ Leasing, trading the generic “Pacific” for the bank that had convened it and making the customer base explicit. Leveraged aircraft leasing followed in 1982 and Japan’s first rolling-stock lease in 1985. Corporate demand for the tax and off-balance-sheet effects of leasing produced double-digit growth through the decade, and IBJ Leasing rode its parent bank’s large-corporate network.

What it did not do mattered as much. Japan Lease, the equivalent company in the Long-Term Credit Bank orbit, drifted from leasing into acting as its bank’s finance arm, and in 1998 filed for reorganisation with ¥2.3 trillion of liabilities. IBJ Leasing kept its resources in leasing and instalment sales. The two companies came out of the same industry structure and ended in opposite places.

The Plaza Accord had pushed Japanese manufacturers into local production across Asia, and their overseas subsidiaries needed the same equipment and vehicles leased that the parents leased at home. IBJ Leasing followed them — a UK company in 1987, a stake in a Thai lessor in 1992, an investment in a Philippine finance company in 1998 — but always in step with IBJ’s own overseas arms or with a local financial institution as partner. It did not attempt to build a network of its own from nothing, a pattern it would repeat in every subsequent expansion.

At home the growth was by subsidiary rather than by division. Real-estate and rental companies were set up in 1993 and 1996; in auto leasing, an in-house company in 1998, the purchase of Nissan Lease in 1999 and of Saison Auto Lease Systems in 2000, and in 2002 a merger that folded the former into the latter and put the group’s vehicle business in one place. None of this was diversification in any strategic sense — it was the same concentric circle of leasing, instalment sales and auto leasing, arranged as separate legal entities.

IBJ Leasing listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s second section in October 2004 and moved to the first section in September 2005 — thirty-five years after founding, and late by the standards of its industry, where Orix had listed in 1970. Staying private that long was itself a description of the business: it had lived inside the IBJ relationship network and had not needed a public market. Listing was followed by a decade of tidying up, with group companies merged or acquired almost every year.

The expansions that mattered came from other people’s businesses. A Shanghai company opened in 2008 and an Indonesian auto-finance joint venture in 2010. In February 2012 the company took over Toshiba Finance’s corporate financial services arm with a 90% stake — Toshiba was selling non-core assets under the weight of its Westinghouse goodwill, and IBJ Leasing acquired both a business and the leasing demand of the Toshiba group with it. Then in 2016 it entered aircraft operating leasing, a business where a single asset costs ¥5–10 billion and the lessor carries both residual-value risk on the airframe and credit risk on the airline. Rather than build a lessor, it formed joint ventures in Bermuda and the United States with the listed US operator Aircastle.

By FY2018 the company was no longer really a lessor. Revenue reached ¥384.9 billion with recurring profit of ¥24.2 billion, and of that profit ¥9.5 billion came from the finance segment — investment, lending and asset management — against ¥18.0 billion from leasing and instalment sales. Hiromoto Motoyama, appointed president in 2016 from Mizuho Securities, had argued that a company confined to plain finance leases could never escape competition from banks and rival lessors. The shareholder register, meanwhile, still looked like 1969: Dai-ichi Life on top with 6.87%, Mizuho Bank at 3.81%, and the founding industrial companies and insurers around them. A company carrying one bank’s name in its own had reached the limit of what that structure could supply.

In February 2019 Mizuho Bank signed a capital and business alliance, taking shares from Dai-ichi Life and others; by March the Mizuho group held 22.2% and the company had become an equity-method affiliate, with Mizuho Bank at 23.03% displacing Dai-ichi Life as largest shareholder. On 1 October 2019 the name changed again, to Mizuho Leasing. What was handed over was a fifth of the equity and a name used for fifty years; what was received was access to Mizuho’s corporate customer base and the right to originate deals with it. FY2019 revenue reached ¥539.2 billion and net income ¥17.5 billion, both above anything achieved as IBJ Leasing.

The other alliance moved faster. In November 2019 Marubeni and Mizuho Leasing agreed to buy Aircastle outright; the deal closed in March 2020 with Mizuho Leasing paying about $629.3M (¥67bn) for 25% of the votes — roughly half of Marubeni’s contribution, leaving the trading house with three-quarters directly and indirectly. Purchases followed in quick succession: a US refrigerated-trailer lessor and a Vietnamese leasing company in 2020, Mizuho Capital and a stake in Nippon Steel Kowa Real Estate in 2021. Then the aircraft market failed twice over. The FY2021 accounts wrote off the entire ¥10.7 billion of Aircastle goodwill; FY2022 carried ¥16.1 billion of one-off items including unrecoverable losses on aircraft leased into Russia. Shusaku Tsuhara, president from 2020, tightened risk management over investees but did not change direction — and by FY2023, with no further Aircastle write-downs, net income reached a record ¥28.4 billion.

On 14 May 2024 Marubeni took 20.0% through a third-party allotment, becoming the second-largest shareholder behind Mizuho’s 23.09% and making Mizuho Leasing its equity-method affiliate too. In five years the company had acquired two parents, neither of which controls it — the only arrangement under which it can draw deals from a bank and a trading house without being absorbed by either. Akira Nakamura, president since 2023, has set a portfolio of core (leasing), growth (real estate, environment and energy, international) and frontier businesses with ¥150 billion of cumulative inorganic investment, and describes the goal as becoming a platform company rather than a lessor. FY2024 revenue was ¥695.4 billion and net income ¥42.0 billion, both records; nineteen Marubeni staff joined; and in April 2025 the stake in Nippon Steel Kowa Real Estate was doubled to 30.14% for ¥50.1 billion. Fifty-six years after sixteen companies each took a slice, the company is still structured as something no one owns outright.