The joint share transfer with Dwango and the KADOKAWA・DWANGO holding company (2014)

Handing over a company to obtain a person

The slogan of the day — the fusion of old media and new — misses the core of this merger. That the side with four times the revenue accepted the minority of a 51:49 split, and that the share-transfer ratio valued Dwango the more highly, cannot be explained as a multiplication of businesses. What chairman Kadokawa Tsuguhiko led with at the press conference was not synergy either, but a single line: that he had at last got hold of “a young manager called Kawakami.” It can be read as the judgement of a seventy-one-year-old who put up the whole company in order to bring in a successor from outside it.

That said, facts remain that the successor-procurement reading does not settle. As president, Kawakami Nobuo opened a correspondence high school in 2016 built on the mechanics of Niconico, a business neither company had had before. Meanwhile what moved three months after the merger was 232 voluntary redundancies on the KADOKAWA side, and the plan for ¥18–20bn of operating profit in the year to March 2018 ended at ¥3.1bn. A merger to obtain a person and a merger to grow a business do not, it appears, advance at the same speed.