Shareholder activism is pushing Japanese companies towards a new era of change and growth, according to Takeshi Niinami, president of Suntory and chair of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives.
The head of one of Japan ’s biggest associations of company leaders said the country had reached a “great tipping point” of corporate change as a critical mass of shareholder activists forced companies to wake from decades of slumber.
The comments by Takeshi Niinami, president of Japanese drinks group Suntory and chair of the influential Japan Association of Corporate Executives, come at the end of a year in which a record number of foreign and domestic activist funds bought a record number of Tokyo-listed stocks. Activist funds, such as Elliott Management and ValueAct, have also become far bolder in their choice of targets — a list that now includes Japan’s biggest property developer, Mitsui Fudosan, and the automaker Nissan. Under pressure created by activist investors, the past year has also produced a sharp increase in the value of unsolicited takeover bids — a tactic once treated as taboo, but now endorsed by the government through a change in merger guidelines. In an interview with the Financial Times, Niinami said the surge in activism and its impact on Japanese chief executives, marked an end to the country’s protracted decades of stagnation, deflation and corporate inertia. “The lost 30 years is over, and we are facing a great tipping point. That has to be positive,” said Niinami, who predicted that activism, dealmaking by private equity and domestic consolidation would continue to rise in 2025. “It’s a tipping point for Japan to become more effective, more productive and more profit making,” said Niinami, who added that Japanese management would now be obliged to pay greater attention to the metrics that investors care most about, such as cost of capital and return on equity. The race was now on, said Niinami, for chief executives to reshape their companies before an activist told them to do so. The unsolicited bid for Seven & i by Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard had underlined the stakes, he sai
Japan Corporate Change Shareholder Activism Takeover Bids Mergers And Acquisitions
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