A record pandemic loss, a new president, and separating ownership from operation (2023)

Choosing a banker from the communications side

The handover from Goto Takashi to Nishiyama Ryuichiro was not a simple generational change; it can be read as an appointment made to execute a specific reform — converting the integrated ownership model whose limits the pandemic had exposed into one specialized in operation. Choosing Nishiyama, who came from Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank and made his career largely in corporate communications, suggests a president picked less as a financial-restructuring specialist than for a phase in which structural reform has to be explained, inside and outside the company, while it is carried out.

Separating ownership from operation was not, however, a policy that began abruptly with Nishiyama. Goto had already set out the separation of hotel assets under the label “asset-light” as early as 2021, and the Nishiyama regime can be seen as inheriting that line and recasting it as an explicit policy. How far a structural shift that ran across more than one chief executive, prompted by an external shock, has actually reached — including how much of the record result for the year to March 2025 it explains — will be judged only as the results accumulate.