The Meitetsu alliance, and a new largest shareholder (2024)

The year the largest shareholder changed hands

What distinguishes this alliance is that the business story and the capital story sit on the same page. On the business side, what was described was raising the investment unit from ¥10–20 billion to ¥30–50 billion, gaining reach into the Nagoya region’s information network, and placing Meitetsu’s properties into private funds and crowdfunding vehicles. On the capital side, what happened was that the founder, the largest shareholder continuously since the second founding of 1994, let go of more than half his holding, and an operating company took it up. Meitetsu is a stable shareholder and, at the same time, a supplier of deals.

There is a gap between how quickly it started and how large the deals actually done have been. Weekly standing meetings and a set of guidelines were in place within six months of signing; the first joint project was a crowdfunding deal totalling $3.4M (¥520m), still far from the ¥30–50 billion scale announced. Around thirty properties in the Nagoya region had been examined, and as of January 2025 none had been approved for investment. The 7,500,100 shares Meitetsu holds are exactly the number of shares President Yamaguchi Seiichiro let go.