Splitting off all operations into a new Hankyu Corporation and becoming the pure holding company Hankyu Holdings (2005)

Getting the structure in place first

Read the shift to a pure holding company as a company following an organisational fashion of the day, and you lose the place of the decision. What Hankyu rearranged was the design itself — running rail, property, retail and entertainment inside a single company — that had held since Kobayashi Ichizo. Coming after the write-down of the unrealised losses on development land, the closure of Nishinomiya Stadium and Takarazuka Family Land, and the reduction of interest-bearing debt from ¥1.1 trillion to about ¥940 billion, this looks to have been one of the few moments when such a step could be taken.

That said, changing the structure did not by itself create earning power. Consolidated operating revenue in the first full year after the move was about ¥486.2 billion, and the substance of the businesses was no different from the year before. The company was in fact carrying fewer facilities, by one stadium and one amusement park. Even so, moving the listed entity to a share-holding company was no small thing: the route to bringing another company into the group by share exchange became usable from that point. Whether the preparation had been done first is what separated the speed of the company’s response when the moment arrived a year later.