The first independent internet provider to go public (1999)

Between ¥4,200 and ¥21,000

The gap between an offer price of $37 (¥4,200) and a first trade at $184 (¥21,000) was the price the market of summer 1999 put on the word “internet.” But the company was able to collect that price because of four years in which it had turned Dial Q2’s billing network into a way of collecting connection fees, pushed capital spending outside itself by having franchisees hold the access points, and gone on earning a profit month after month. Five people prepared the listing, the president among them, and four of them had never done the work before. That it reached the over-the-counter market not by first assembling people versed in the rules but by filling in the forms while running says something about this company’s speed.

The listing also set the premises of later decisions. Holding equity as a currency, it put a subsidiary on a different market the following year, and thereafter made welcoming companies in by share exchange routine. What it obtained in 1999 was less the ¥120 billion valuation than permission to use the capital markets over and over. In June 2005 it climbed the last step to the TSE First Section — and that autumn it decided to enter financial services, staking the credit built up in the public markets on a different kind of bet.