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The best advice for a Japanese chief executive right now, confides an investment banking head in Tokyo, is to plot out a move so radical that nobody imagines you would ever consider it: the sale of seemingly indispensable assets, a full break-up, a transformative deal — something that goes way beyond anything you’ve already said you will do to raise corporate value.
東京的一位投資銀行負責人坦言，目前對日本首席執行長的最佳建議是策劃一項極其激進的舉措，以至於沒有人會想到你會考慮這樣的做法：出售看似不可或缺的資產、徹底分拆、變革性交易——一些遠遠超出你說過要爲提升企業價值能採取的任何舉動。
Then put that idea in the company safe, mark it “emergency use” and keep the combination handy. The chances are rising that it will be needed before the end of 2025. Corporate Japan has been rumbled, and everyone needs a plan.
然後把這個想法放進公司保險箱，標明「緊急使用」，並隨身攜帶密碼。在2025年年底之前，需要用到它的可能性越來越大。日本企業已經受到衝擊，每家都需要一個計劃。
The recommendation, which the banker says he has dispensed to various worried CEOs since September, caps a year in which the environment for Japanese listed companies has fundamentally changed, at a pace that few would have considered plausible as recently as 18 months ago. Corporate governance abuse, woeful allocation of capital and the chronic playing down of shareholder interests are much harder to hide. The market is newly scary in ways that include the state-sanctioned concept of “takeover without consent”.
這位銀行家說，自9月份以來，他已經向多位憂心忡忡的首席執行長提出了這一建議。在這一年裏，日本上市公司的環境發生了根本性的變化，而這種變化的速度在18個月前還很少有人會認爲是可行的。濫用公司治理、糟糕的資本分配以及長期壓低股東利益的現象更加難以掩蓋。包括國家認可的「未經同意的收購」概念在內，市場又有了新的可怕之處。
Japan will close 2024 second only to the US for shareholder activism and dealmaking by private equity. The escalating clash between KKR and Bain Capital over Fuji Soft is a stunning showcase of what can happen when an activist fund with a decent sized stake decides to initiate a sale process for the whole company and private equity decides to go gladiatorial over the outcome.
2024年，日本的股東維權主義主義和私募股權交易將僅次於美國。KKR與貝恩資本(Bain Capital)在富士軟體問題上的衝突不斷升級，令人震驚地展示了當一家擁有相當規模股份的維權基金決定啓動整個公司的出售程式，而私募股權基金決定對結果進行鬥爭時可能發生的情況。
Mainstream investors are also being encouraged to take a tougher line on Japanese companies, and by the establishment itself. In November, the Tokyo Stock Exchange published an extraordinary document citing the experience of frustrated fund managers and setting out, in sometimes embarrassing detail, “cases where companies are not aligned with investors’ perspectives”.
主流投資者也被鼓勵對日本公司採取更強硬的態度，而這也是受到了體制的鼓勵。11月，東京證券交易所發佈了一份特別檔案，列舉了受挫基金經理的經歷，並以有時令人尷尬的細節列出了「公司與投資者觀點不一致的案例」。
The government’s M&A guidelines were meanwhile updated in mid-2023 to encourage greater transparency by companies on offers they have received, and to propel some much overdue domestic consolidation. Entrenched managements cannot simply ignore approaches as they did in the past.
與此同時，政府在2023年年中更新了併購指南，以鼓勵企業提高所收到收購要約的透明度，並推動一些早該進行的國內整合。根深蒂固的管理層不能再像過去那樣對這些接洽置之不理。
The $47bn takeover approach by Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard for Japan’s biggest convenience store operator, Seven & i Holdings, has proved that no Japanese company is off limits unless national security is threatened. Nissan’s preliminary merger talks with Honda may well have been accelerated by the perception that a delay would have given time for a foreign buyer to pounce.
加拿大Alimentation Couche-Tard公司以470億美元收購日本最大的便利店營運商Seven & i Holdings的做法證明，除非國家安全受到威脅，否則任何日本公司都不會被排除在外。日產汽車公司與本田汽車公司的初步合併談判之所以加快，很可能是因爲人們認爲，如果推遲談判，外國買家就有時間撲上來。
While Japanese companies have fretted to their advisers about how to deal with the desk-thumping demands of an aggressive activist, how to mollify more directly critical pension funds or how to remain independent in the face of a legitimate, deep-pocketed buyer, brokers and bankers have been busily constructing lists of precisely which weakly valued, poorly governed names represent the most vulnerable targets.
當日本公司焦慮不安地諮詢顧問，如何應對強硬的維權者的激烈要求、如何安撫更挑剔的養老基金或如何在面對財大氣粗的合法買家保持獨立時，券商和銀行家們卻在忙著編制名單，精確地列出哪些估值低、管理差的公司是最容易受到攻擊的目標。
“Now, nobody’s safe and that’s the way it should be . . . Japan is a dirt-cheap, highly liquid, target-rich environment,” says CLSA strategist Nicholas Smith.
「現在，沒有人是安全的，本來就該如此……日本是一個價格極低、流動性高、目標豐富的環境，」里昂證券(CLSA)策略師尼古拉斯•史密斯(Nicholas Smith)說。
The reality for Japanese companies, in the face of this sudden omni-challenge from activists or buyers, is that there are really only a couple of ways to reliably defend themselves. Some minnows may put their faith in a poison pill, some may hope that they are swaddled in the protective casing of national security. Everyone else just needs to be a lot more profitable and a lot more valuable than they are now.
面對來自維權者或買家的突如其來的全方位挑戰，日本公司的現實情況是，只有幾種方法可以可靠地保護自己。一些「小蝦米」可能寄希望於毒丸計劃，另一些可能希望自己被裹在國家安全的保護殼裏。其他公司只需要比現在更有利可圖，更有價值。
The good news is that the presence of all that private equity and its eagerness to buy (and even fight over) quality Japanese businesses mean that fate is currently providing a solution. Offloading non-core businesses and streamlining companies into simpler entities has never been a more available option.
好訊息是，大量私募股權的存在及其對收購（甚至爭奪）優質日本企業的熱情，意味著命運目前正在提供一個解決方案。剝離非核心業務並將公司簡化爲更簡單的實體，從未像現在這樣成爲一個更可行的選擇。
But not all will have time to do that before the activist, the hostile buyer or a combination of both decides to strike. And when they do, one of the clearest grounds for attack will be the failure of the current management to focus sufficiently on raising the company’s valuation and profitability. When the activists sneer at the timidity of the midterm plan, or the buyer exploits the conglomerate discount your corporate structure invites, it is time to activate the plan in the safe: a revaluation rip-cord to see off the assailant with a bold, ready-to-deploy demonstration of radical thinking.
但並不是所有企業都有時間在維權投資者、敵意收購者或兩者的組合決定出擊之前做好準備。而當他們出手時，最明顯的攻擊理由之一將是現任管理層未能充分專注於提高公司的估值和盈利能力。當維權投資者嘲笑中期計劃的保守，或買家利用你的企業結構所帶來的集團折扣時，是時候啓動保險箱中的計劃了：一個重新估值的緊急方案，以大膽、隨時可用的激進思維來擊退攻擊者。
It is a fine theory and, in the very short term, good advice. It will not be long, though, before every investor’s first question to Japanese management is, “What have you got in the safe?”
這是一個很好的理論，在短期內也是一個很好的建議。不過，用不了多久，每個投資者向日本管理層提出的第一個問題就是：「你的保險箱裏有什麼？」