Sunwels - Company History

Nawashiro Akinori fell ill with kidney disease while at university, spent a long stretch in hospital, dropped out, and was not able to enter working life until he was twenty-five. Lacking the physical stamina for ordinary salaried work, he needed a business one person could run and that no one else was competing for. He found it inside his father’s architectural firm in Kanazawa: barrier-free home modification — handrails, removing steps — at ¥40,000 to ¥50,000 a job.

The opening was regulatory. Japan’s long-term care insurance, introduced in April 2000, covered 90% of such modifications for certified elderly residents, but capped eligible work at ¥200,000. The jobs were too small for established builders to bother with; standardize the insurance paperwork and the small-scale work, however, and volume made it a business. Nawashiro became president of the family firm in 2002 and grew the barrier-free specialty to about ten employees.

In September 2006 he set up Care Communications in Kanazawa to run day services, taking the idea of converting old traditional houses rather than building new — keeping initial investment low while large operators concentrated on high-capacity urban facilities. In April 2011 the company absorbed two care subsidiaries of his father’s firm, renamed itself Sunwels, and became a subsidiary of that firm — placing his own company below rather than above in the capital structure in order to unify the operations. Five years after entering care, it was a competent regional mid-sized operator, and nothing more.

Roughly thirty Parkinson’s patients were living in Sunwels’ existing facilities, receiving the same uniform daily support as everyone else — and deteriorating, because the disease needs medication timed several times a day, fall prevention and swallowing management, none of which a general facility delivers. Hospitals treat but do not house. Having recovered himself only after meeting a kidney specialist, Nawashiro concluded that specialist involvement decides the outcome. In June 2018 he opened PD House in Ishikawa: visiting neurologists, medication managed several times daily, purpose-designed handrails and a rehabilitation room. Nothing like it existed in Japan or abroad.

The economics were the second invention. Residents draw long-term care insurance as certified elderly, while a linked visiting-nurse station allows medical insurance to be billed for nursing visits on top — lifting monthly revenue per bed far above what a paid nursing home normally earns. Once the model proved reproducible, expansion was fast: Fukuoka in 2019, then prefecture after prefecture.

Sunwels listed on the TSE Growth market in June 2022 at ¥1,940 a share, needing capital for facilities and a recruiting brand capable of assembling nurses and neurologists nationwide. By April 2022 it ran twenty PD Houses and 1,047 beds with a waiting list above two hundred. Nine new facilities opened in FY2024 and net profit rose about 2.6 times to ¥2.03bn; headcount went from 707 in FY2020 to 2,435 in FY2023; non-consolidated revenue climbed from ¥5.4bn in the year to March 2021 to ¥26.5bn in the year to March 2025. The company moved up to the Prime market in 2024. The medium-term plan called for 140 facilities by March 2030.

On 14 February 2025 Sunwels held an emergency briefing on improper visiting-nurse billing. Facility revenue targets had been set at a level reachable only by visiting residents three times a day with multiple staff, and visits had spread to residents asleep at night who did not need them; checking a sleep sensor or looking in for a few minutes was routinely recorded as roughly thirty minutes of nursing. Estimates put the excess at about ¥2.8bn across more than 170,000 instances. Because the disputed item was medical insurance revenue itself, the question was not a billing error but the business model.

In May 2025 the company formally withdrew its medium-term plan. Visiting-nurse care plans were rewritten at every facility, night-time visits cut back, staffing recalculated — with medical insurance revenue per resident expected to fall from around ¥800,000 to ¥600,000 a month. Nawashiro told a local newspaper that a move back down from the Prime market to Growth was under consideration.

FY2026 was the first year of the reconstruction: thirteen new PD Houses as planned for fifty-six in total, occupancy of 87% at existing facilities and 45% at new ones, and a net loss of ¥1.6bn — a loss that came in ¥625m better than budget only because the founder personally donated to the company. The board has been pared back to Nawashiro, four audit committee members and one corporate officer, concentrating control further in the founder at precisely the moment the problem was insufficient check on him. What remains to be seen is whether a genuinely distinctive position — the only Parkinson’s-specialized operator in the country — can be made to pay on care-insurance revenue alone, from June 2026 under a new comprehensive visiting-nurse fee system, and whether the company can stand without its founder’s own money.