Listing at sixty: the largest IPO of 2017 (2017)

What became of the integrated-logistics picture

This listing was the moment a company that had turned from volume-chasing delivery to margin-defending delivery put the results to the capital market. Given that it opened above its offer price on the back of record forecasts and was rated the largest IPO of 2017, the change of course was accepted by the market. But since the listing was not merely a means of raising money — it was also groundwork laid with an eye to combining with Hitachi Transport System — the real point of the decision can be seen as the shedding of the skin of a “parcel company” to become an “integrated logistics company.” The offering was conceived as the device that would support that transformation from the capital side.

The union with the partner in whom that picture was invested, however, did not come off, undone by an abrupt change in conditions and by the partner’s own recapitalization. The stake taken on the premise of integration was liquidated, and the shift to integrated logistics had to be redrawn away from the original blueprint. A listing can succeed even when the whole strategy behind it does not go to plan — and that SG Holdings then moved toward acquisitions on its own can be read as an attempt to use the position won by going public along a different road from the one first intended. In what configuration of businesses the company will now redraw the integrated-logistics picture is still not visible.