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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.
东京的一位投资银行负责人坦言，目前对日本首席执行官的最佳建议是策划一项极其激进的举措，以至于没有人会想到你会考虑这样的做法：出售看似不可或缺的资产、彻底分拆、变革性交易——一些远远超出你说过要为提升企业价值能采取的任何举动。
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.
然后把这个想法放进公司保险箱，标明“紧急使用”，并随身携带密码。在2025年年底之前，需要用到它的可能性越来越大。日本企业已经受到冲击，每家都需要一个计划。
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”.
这位银行家说，自9月份以来，他已经向多位忧心忡忡的首席执行官提出了这一建议。在这一年里，日本上市公司的环境发生了根本性的变化，而这种变化的速度在18个月前还很少有人会认为是可行的。滥用公司治理、糟糕的资本分配以及长期压低股东利益的现象更加难以掩盖。包括国家认可的“未经同意的收购”概念在内，市场又有了新的可怕之处。
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，日本的股东维权主义主义和私募股权交易将仅次于美国。KKR与贝恩资本(Bain Capital)在富士软件问题上的冲突不断升级，令人震惊地展示了当一家拥有相当规模股份的维权基金决定启动整个公司的出售程序，而私募股权基金决定对结果进行斗争时可能发生的情况。
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”.
主流投资者也被鼓励对日本公司采取更强硬的态度，而这也是受到了体制的鼓励。11月，东京证券交易所发布了一份特别文件，列举了受挫基金经理的经历，并以有时令人尴尬的细节列出了“公司与投资者观点不一致的案例”。
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.
与此同时，政府在2023年年中更新了并购指南，以鼓励企业提高所收到收购要约的透明度，并推动一些早该进行的国内整合。根深蒂固的管理层不能再像过去那样对这些接洽置之不理。
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470亿美元收购日本最大的便利店运营商Seven & i Holdings的做法证明，除非国家安全受到威胁，否则任何日本公司都不会被排除在外。日产汽车公司与本田汽车公司的初步合并谈判之所以加快，很可能是因为人们认为，如果推迟谈判，外国买家就有时间扑上来。
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.
当日本公司焦虑不安地咨询顾问，如何应对强硬的维权者的激烈要求、如何安抚更挑剔的养老基金或如何在面对财大气粗的合法买家保持独立时，券商和银行家们却在忙着编制名单，精确地列出哪些估值低、管理差的公司是最容易受到攻击的目标。
“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.
“现在，没有人是安全的，本来就该如此……日本是一个价格极低、流动性高、目标丰富的环境，”里昂证券(CLSA)策略师尼古拉斯•史密斯(Nicholas Smith)说。
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.
面对来自维权者或买家的突如其来的全方位挑战，日本公司的现实情况是，只有几种方法可以可靠地保护自己。一些“小虾米”可能寄希望于毒丸计划，另一些可能希望自己被裹在国家安全的保护壳里。其他公司只需要比现在更有利可图，更有价值。
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.
好消息是，大量私募股权的存在及其对收购（甚至争夺）优质日本企业的热情，意味着命运目前正在提供一个解决方案。剥离非核心业务并将公司简化为更简单的实体，从未像现在这样成为一个更可行的选择。
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.
但并不是所有企业都有时间在维权投资者、敌意收购者或两者的组合决定出击之前做好准备。而当他们出手时，最明显的攻击理由之一将是现任管理层未能充分专注于提高公司的估值和盈利能力。当维权投资者嘲笑中期计划的保守，或买家利用你的企业结构所带来的集团折扣时，是时候启动保险箱中的计划了：一个重新估值的紧急方案，以大胆、随时可用的激进思维来击退攻击者。
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?”
这是一个很好的理论，在短期内也是一个很好的建议。不过，用不了多久，每个投资者向日本管理层提出的第一个问题就是：“你的保险箱里有什么？”