The Mizuho alliance: equity-method affiliation and a new name (2019)

The price of handing over the sign

What IBJ Leasing offered up in this decision was 22.2% of its shares and a corporate name it had used for fifty years. What it received was connection to Mizuho Financial Group’s customer base and the right to originate jointly in growth fields. When a bank-affiliated lessor feels the limit of developing customers on its own, the available roads are two: keep independence and accept being outscaled, or move inside the group and be supplied with deals. IBJ Leasing chose the latter — and even then kept the distance of equity-method rather than subsidiary status. The design of the transaction shows in the order of events: it kept its listing and its managerial autonomy, and handed over the sign first.

Looking at the first year of the alliance, what lifted the figures was not Mizuho but the overseas joint operation with Marubeni. What the bank supplied was joint origination, a thing whose results take time to appear in the accounts. A structure that welcomed both a bank and a trading house as shareholders can be read as aimed at deal flow that depends on neither one alone. The seat that opened in the capital structure in 2019 was not the only one: next to the chair given to Mizuho Bank sits Marubeni, with 20.0%, from 2024.