Becoming a holding company and splitting the businesses apart (2005)

The name that binds, the responsibility that divides

The unification of 1987 and the demerger of 2005 look opposite in direction. But what was unified was the external name, and what was divided was profit responsibility by business. To the landowner and the tenant the counterparty remained “Starts”, while inside the company construction, brokerage, condominium sales and corporate services each carried their own profit and loss — reconciling those two things is what the 2005 design can be seen as aiming at. Given that regional demergers had already been under way since 2003, the move to a holding company is less a sudden turn than a tidying-up of a separation already in progress.

It is hard to assert that the holding structure itself produced the results. Consolidated sales grew about 2.6 times between the year to March 2006 and the year to March 2025, but most of that was carried by the construction and management of rental housing, the businesses the company has had since its founding, and there is little material directly linking the change of structure to the growth. What is really being asked is whether a group whose number of businesses keeps rising can keep re-deciding where responsibility sits. How far the method of holding one name while rearranging the contents will serve in the next reorganisation remains an open question.