U-NEXT absorbs USEN and moves to a holding-company structure (2017)

The surviving entity was the one left unsold

Looking only at the row of numbers, this integration appears upside down. U-NEXT had ¥114.3 billion of sales for the year to December 2017, while USEN — with roughly 750,000 business premises as customers — was older, larger and far better known. Yet the surviving entity of the merger was U-NEXT, and the company that ceased to exist was USEN. As the 43,572,011 shares allotted in the deal indicate, most of the stock of the post-merger holding company was held by former USEN shareholders; only the surviving legal personality remained on the U-NEXT side.

What was tied back together, meanwhile, closely resembles what had been taken apart. Putting a sales force that sells several products to shops and a business that streams to individuals for a monthly fee inside the same group overlaps with the arrangement of 2008, when staffing, film distribution, streaming and cable broadcasting sat side by side. What differed was that the relatedness of the businesses was now bound to a concrete point of contact — the shop customer — and that the surviving entity was the side that had spent seven years building a record as a separate company. In April 2024 the five letters of USEN disappeared from the holding company’s name, and it became U-NEXT HOLDINGS.