Archive link: https://archive.ph/NF2r0
At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It’s just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time… :-)
It’ll never happen. Nintendo would laugh them off if they even suggested it.
Microsoft tried buying Nintendo a few years before the first Xbox came out, and Nintendo execs laughed to their face.
Source: Dean Takahashi’s Inside Xbox, very interesting book.
Lol that’s great
Nintendo is a publicly traded company. It can happen against their wishes. This is known as a hostile takeover.
Japan’s first successful hostile takeover only happened in June 2019
Many companies in Japan have keiretsu style cross shareholding,
These cross shareholding systems create a resistance towards hostile takeover, which have both its up and down sides, but at least it has resisted the likes of corporate raiders, e.g. Carl Icahn, where they acquire companies for asset stripping. Corporate raiders don’t create values for society, it’s to fatten payouts.
Sorry for the long reply, it’s just for other users to get a glimpse on why hostile takeover is extremely rare in Japan, and probably doubly so when it comes to foreign hostile takeover.
Don’t apologise, this is great insight. Thank you for your comment.
Very interesting, thank yoi
While that’s true successful hostile takeovers by foreigners are rare in Japan. Japanese companies often implement a poison pill to thwart a takeover.
What exactly does that mean?
Basically the company board has approved a policy where the company will issue new shares if one owner reaches a certain percentage of current shares. Those shares can be then purchased by the existing shareholders (excluding the one(s) that already owns more than the percentage) with a discount.
So Nintendo could have such a policy in place that if one shareholder goes over 20%, new shares will be issued to other shareholders, lowering the value of each share, and effectively also the relative amount of shares (percentage) owned by that one shareholder. That basically leaves only one option, the buyer attempting the takeover would have to negotiate with the board directly. And in the case of Microsoft, the board would laugh at their face.
Maybe they could achieve the takeover via shell shareholders remaining under the percentage each, and get them to vote in a new board that would revoke the policy, but that’s way more difficult to pull off.
They implement measures to make it very difficult for a single shareholder to gain a majority stake in the company. It’s called a poison pill because it will fuck over every shareholder. Like when a company creates new shares but never put those on sale and thus dilute the shares of all shareholders. Of course the company can only do that if the shareholders voted for such a policy.
Yeah, Nintendo have enough funds to just sit there and do nothing for decades. We also have seen plenty that they chose to go their own way instead of chasing whatever is popular right now for a quick buck.
As long as they have leaders following the Nintendo philosophy, they’re just going to truck on, at their own pace for better and worse.