Converting to a certified broadcasting holding company and spinning out the terrestrial business (2012)

The author’s view

Mergers between stations are closed off by law, Ujiie Seiichiro said plainly in 2009. In an industry that cannot turn five Tokyo stations into four, the only road to scale in the face of shrinking advertising runs outside broadcasting. The restructuring of October 2012 can be seen as the practical answer to that dead end. Moving the licence to a new company and turning the parent into a holding company put the terrestrial, BS and CS broadcasters and the production companies under one capital structure, and made buying a non-broadcasting company and placing it in the group an ordinary procedural act.

Putting the structure in place, however, was not the same as generating earnings. As Ujiie himself put it, a large market is not so easily found: Tipness, brought into the group, recorded an impairment of ¥19.8 billion in the year to March 2021, and the life and health segment sank to a loss of ¥7.2 billion. As late as FY2023, management still began its explanations by acknowledging the structural problem in television advertising. The holding company only arranged the preconditions for building a business outside broadcasting; the questions of what to buy and how to grow it were carried over into the decade that followed.