Airbus built a marvel of machine to carry plane parts to have the entire world be like “haha whale plane”
Airbus eventually embraced it and let engineers have fun on the design 😂
Called the IR line for a Japanese net-net trading at 0.4x book with more cash than market cap.
Rings twice. A woman answers.
“Hai, de gozaimasu.”
I butcher my way through asking for investor relations in Japanese. Long pause. I switch to English. Longer pause.
“One moment please.”
Hold music. It’s a MIDI version of a song I think I recognize from a Studio Ghibli film. Three minutes pass. Four.
“Hello. This is Tanaka-san. General Affairs.”
Not IR. General Affairs. The department that orders the office slippers.
“Hi, I’m a shareholder. I had some questions about capital allocation.”
A pause so long I check if the call
dropped.
“Yes.”
That’s the whole response. Yes.
“You’re holding ¥80 billion in cash. Your market cap is ¥55 billion. Have you considered a buyback?”
“We are studying.”
“For how long?”
“Since 2009.”
I laugh. He does not laugh.
“What about the cross-shareholdings? You own stakes in seven other listed companies worth roughly ¥30 billion.”
“These are important business relationships. Tanaka-san at Sumitomo and our president were at university together.”
Different Tanaka-san. I don’t ask.
“Are there plans to unwind them?”
“We review annually.”
“And the conclusion?”
“To continue reviewing.”
I hear a fax machine in the background. An actual fax machine. In 2026.
“The activist fund that filed last quarter — are you engaging with their proposals?”
“We received the letter. We are considering carefully.”
“They sent it eight months ago.”
“Yes. Carefully.”
A long silence. I can hear someone in the background unwrapping what sounds like a rice cracker.
“Tanaka-san, with respect, the company has traded below book for fourteen years.”
“The market will understand eventually.”
“When?”
“When it is time.”
He thanks me four times for my interest. I thank him three times. We bow at each other through the phone. I hang up.
Stock is unchanged.
Has been unchanged. The cash pile grew another ¥2 billion last quarter. Tanaka-san is reviewing.
People who moved abroad alone in their 20s, handled all docs, bank account, visa, tax, jobs, accomadation, and culture difference
These people fear nothing anymore
Interesting take: Japan became the scapegoat for East Asia’s demographic decline simply because it aged first but was quickly outpaces by its neighbors.
After carefully monitoring the situation in Venezuela for the last 24 hours, the EU has found out that the water bottle of Maduro did not have the EU-regulation approved attached cap.