Opinion Business unusual By Scott T. Hards	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
ホリエモンに物申す 鮮やかな奇襲作戦を成功させた堀江社長だが、 この先は果たしてどうなるだろう？

Whether or not he succeeds in building the media empire he dreams of, Livedoor President Takafumi Horie will go down in Japanese business history as the man who launched a brilliant sneak attack against Nippon Broadcasting System. Japan's capital markets have never before seen such a display of backdoor, though entirely legal, money maneuvers.

While I admire his obvious intelligence and cunning, I see three factors that may combine to trip up his M&A efforts and cloud Livedoor's future:

(1) Lack of focus: In just a few months, Horie has bounced between trying to buy into baseball, rescue horseracing and now purchase media outlets. Does he even have a long-term vision for Livedoor? Their website is an embarrassing rip-off of Yahoo! Japan. I hope he's got more in mind than mimicking that Internet pioneer.

(2) Negotiation naivete: Japan's business world has no experience with hostile takeovers. If he thought the people at Fuji TV would happily sit down to talk after his surprise acquisition of Nippon Broadcasting's shares, he's not as smart as I thought. Hostile takeovers, even when they succeed, usually fail to live up to expectations. Some talented staff and valuable clients are almost always lost.

(3) Belief in the "synergy" myth: Horie has mentioned "synergy" as one of his key reasons for wanting Nippon Broadcasting. Synergy is probably best explained as "1+1=3." The idea is that two companies, if their businesses mesh, can be bigger than the sum of their parts. It sounds good, but it almost never happens in practice. The idea is now widely discredited in American business. Big failures include the merger of AOL and Time Warner, as well as Sony's acquisition of Columbia. The inability of Sony's hardware and software arms to cooperate is often cited as a big reason for their current problems. Ironically, one of the companies that has hurt Sony is Apple Computer with their hugely successful "iPod" music player. That firm's president, Steve Jobs, runs not only Apple but also Pixar, the computer-animation studio which created mega-hits like "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo." Despite managing both firms, Jobs has wisely kept them completely independent of each other.

Fuji TV's and Nippon Broadcasting's responses to Horie's maneuvering have been as clumsy as his have been dextrous. In particular, their crude treatment of their own shareholders is quite shocking. Japan's courts were wise to nix their ill-conceived emergency share issue plan.

If Horie hopes to make Livedoor a stable, profitable enterprise in the coming years, he needs to focus more on establishing a solid, core business and growing it from within, and less on playing the corporate black hole that sucks in anything and everything that comes its way, simply because it can.

Shukan ST: April 1, 2005

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