Company history

Daishi Electric Railway was incorporated in February 1898 with capital of ¥98,000 to carry worshippers to the Kawasaki Daishi temple, and began running in January 1899 between Rokugobashi and Daishi — the first electric tram service in the Kanto region. The route was only a couple of kilometres. What made it a viable start was that a place of worship generates demand a promoter can actually forecast, and Keikyu treated it as something to be cultivated rather than merely served: the New Year temple visit that the company promoted around its line became, over time, the national custom of hatsumode.

The company also saw the limit of that traffic almost immediately. Three months after opening, in April 1899, it renamed itself Keihin Electric Railway — “Kei-hin” for Tokyo and Yokohama — declaring in its own name that it intended to be an intercity railway rather than a temple line. In December 1905 it completed the run from Shinagawa to Kanagawa, taking a share of the main artery between the two cities.

The southern half of the network arrived separately. Shonan Electric Railway was set up in December 1925 with capital of ¥12 million to build on the Miura Peninsula, opened its lines in April 1930, and from April 1933 ran through trains with Keihin between Shinagawa and Uraga — two companies operating as one traffic zone. Keihin absorbed Shonan and its bus affiliate in November 1941, having entered scheduled bus operation in 1927, and so held the whole Tokyo–Miura corridor, rail and road, in one company. It lasted six months. In May 1942 wartime transport control merged Keihin, along with Odakyu, into Tokyo Yokohama Electric Railway, renamed Tokyu; the Keikyu name disappeared, not by any decision of its own.

In June 1948 Keihin Kyuko Electric Railway was separated out of Tokyu with capital of ¥100 million, alongside Odakyu and Keio, keeping “Keihin” in its name to assert continuity with the prewar company. It listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in May 1949 — a year after being handed back its independence, it had access to public capital. The founding date runs back to 1898, but the company that exists today starts in 1948.

The 1950s were spent buying up everything a railway’s passengers might otherwise spend money on: a leisure operator and a bus company in 1954, a department store the same year that became the Keikyu Store chain, and a property arm in 1958. Aburatsubo Marine Park opened in 1968 and the Hotel Pacific Tokyo in 1971. Within twenty years of re-independence, Keikyu had become what Japanese private railways call a line-side life company — earning from housing, retail, leisure and hotels along track it already owned.

Two extensions then finished the map. From June 1968 the opening between Shinagawa and Sengakuji let Keikyu trains run through onto the Toei Asakusa subway and into central Tokyo, lifting the commuting value of the entire line. In April 1975 the main line reached Misakiguchi at the tip of the Miura Peninsula — seventy-six years after the first trams ran two kilometres to a temple. What followed was station-front property: the Keikyu No. 1 Building at Shinagawa in 1983, the Yokosuka Research Park from 1995, and in 1996 the Kamiooka complex with the Keikyu Department Store, its flagship in southern Yokohama.

Population growth along the line was flattening while Haneda, rebuilt out over the bay, was adding slots and passengers every year. Keikyu had reached Tenkubashi in 1993 and connected there to the Tokyo Monorail, but a connection is not the same as a ride: passengers still changed trains. In November 1998 it opened the section from Tenkubashi into Haneda Airport itself, running trains directly to the terminal building, and took the advantage that no interchange confers. The international terminal station followed in October 2010, and the tangle where the airport line crossed the main line at Keikyu Kamata was resolved by a grade separation completed in October 2012 — outbound tracks on the third floor, inbound on the second — which also allowed more trains to run.

The effect was to shift the company’s centre of gravity from “the railway between Tokyo, Yokohama and the Miura Peninsula” to “the railway into Haneda.” It was a long payback: heavy infrastructure spending first, revenue afterwards, with president Harada Kazuyuki noting in 2014 only that the effect of the early hardware investment was beginning to show.

The group was reorganised around the same period. In 2003 the bus operations, run together with the railway since 1927, were spun off into a separate company so that two businesses with quite different cost structures could stand on their own accounts; retail was consolidated through the 2000s. Then in September 2019 Keikyu moved its head office from Minato-ku in Tokyo to Yokohama — the first time the company had been headquartered on its own line. Harada justified it by the numbers at the two stations, roughly 320,000 daily passengers at Yokohama against 280,000 at Shinagawa, but the move was symbolic as much as practical: the group’s centre of gravity, formally placed among the people it carried.

COVID-19 hit every segment at once — rail, hotels, buses, retail. In the year to March 2021 consolidated revenue fell ¥77.8bn to ¥235.0bn, with an operating loss of ¥18.4bn and a net loss of ¥27.2bn; rail passengers were down 30.5%, and extraordinary losses included ¥8.8bn to demolish the Shinagawa Goos hotel and ¥1.9bn of hotel impairments. Harada described it plainly: recessions had reduced travel before, but nothing on this scale had happened in his experience — the worst trial since the war.

What Keikyu did not do was stop building. The group plan of May 2021 named Shinagawa, Haneda and Yokohama its “growth triangle,” and Harada argued that if the company stopped preparing during the pandemic it would have nothing to stand on afterwards. Long-term investment in the Shinagawa west gate — the Takanawa 3-chome district — continued through the loss years. Some things were let go: Aburatsubo Marine Park, opened in 1968, closed in September 2021 after fifty-three years. Kawamata Yukihiro became the twenty-fifth president in 2022.

Then, in the year to March 2024, Keikyu sold part of its land interest at the Shinagawa west gate to Toyota, its partner in redeveloping it, booking an extraordinary gain of $631M (¥96bn). Against consolidated operating profit of ¥28.0bn, net profit came to ¥83.8bn — roughly five times the previous year. Selling a piece of the site that has symbolised the company since its founding was the financing for what comes next: a 310,000-square-metre office, hotel and conference complex on the Shinagawa Goos site, due to open in the year to March 2030, with management telling analysts in May 2024 that Takanawa 3-chome would only reach full operation from the year to March 2031, when free cash flow turns positive. The rest of the balance sheet was bent to fit — an asset-management subsidiary set up in July 2024, a golf course outside the line divested in September, a ¥10.1bn impairment in the year to March 2026 as double-tracking of the Kurihama Line was frozen and the department store building was reassessed. A railway that had held land for a century was reorganising itself around turning it over. That is also what drew activist investors from the former Murakami fund to the register — the value asleep in the book value, and a share price below it.