Japan’s King of Deals Preps His Biggest Buy in Yen Headwinds
(Bloomberg) -- Minebea Mitsumi Inc.’s chief executive officer -- dubbed the “King of Deals” in Japan -- seeks his biggest acquisition yet, even as a crumbling yen constrains his search.
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The Tokyo-based maker of ball bearings and high-precision components is in the market to buy a company with revenue of 300 billion yen ($2.1 billion) or more in the next few years, Chief Executive Officer Yoshihisa Kainuma, 66, told Bloomberg News in an interview.
Kainuma declined to elaborate further on a timeframe or whether talks are ongoing, but he said separately that the company is keen to buy makers of machine components to beef up its product offerings. The company supplies a wide range of components to customers including Apple Inc., Nintendo Co. and Toyota Motor Corp., according to Bloomberg Data.
“Even when the world gets fully digitalized, you always need to physically pick things up and move things around in the end,” he said. “You need machine components to get the job done.”
With a chronic weak yen weighing on the company’s ability to match rivals’ bids for overseas firms on the block recently, Minebea Mitsumi has been on a spending spree at home. In a span of weeks in July and August, it snatched up companies Sumiko Tec Co., Honda Tsushin Kogyo Co. and Honda Lock Manufacturing Co. The Japanese currency dropped to its lowest in 24 years on Thursday.
“The current exchange rate makes overseas companies cost 20% to 30% more, making it very risky to buy them now,” Kainuma said. “I pride myself on my ability to buy low.”
Since taking the CEO post in 2009, Kainuma has purchased 23 companies and says he is constantly juggling about five potential deals to expand the company’s lineup to meet a rapidly changing market. Minebea Mitsumi targets adding sales of 800 billion yen, or about 70% of its current revenue, through acquisitions by 2029.
“We want to be a sort of grocery store, where a customer can buy meat, fish, vegetables and liquors of all the same quality at reasonable prices,” Kainuma said of the company’s pursuit of components used in products such as energy-efficient lighting.
Kainuma’s most successful deal has been the purchase of Mitsumi Electric Co. in 2017. After turning around the then-struggling Nintendo supplier, the Mitsumi unit now contributes more than 30% of the entire group’s revenue.
Decades of similarly well-timed deals have kept Minebea Mitsumi relevant during successive waves of technology -- from hard disks to smartphones and game consoles. They helped Kainuma’s firm grow from a small ball-bearing supplier on the outskirts of Tokyo to a key player in the global technology supply chain.
The market expects Minebea Mitsumi to buy more automobile-related component firms to partner with auto parts unit U-Shin Ltd., said Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Toyo Securities. “Kainuma is good at not just buying companies but also post-merger integration,” he said. “We want to see him filling in gaps between U-Shin and other units of the company for better across-the-portfolio synergy.”
Read more: Japan’s King of Deals Preparing to Pounce Once Valuations Dip
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