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… :-)

Email chain between Phil Spencer, Chris Capossela, and Takeshi Numoto discussing the potentially hostile purchase of Nintendo, ZeniMax, WB Games, and TikTok

  • 520
    14•10 months ago

    Nintendo is a publicly traded company. It can happen against their wishes. This is known as a hostile takeover.

    • sub_oEnglish
      23•10 months ago

      Japan’s first successful hostile takeover only happened in June 2019

      Many companies in Japan have keiretsu style cross shareholding,

      • vertical keiretsu: with manufacturing industry largely comprises of parent company holding shares of their suppliers, distributors, etc, and in return those suppliers / distributors / sub companies hold some amount of shares of the parent company. These sort of shield them from market fluctuations.
      • horizontal keiretsu: when the relationships between companies are more horizontally sliced, e.g. you often see Mitsubishi UFJ, Mitsubishi Electronics, Mitsubishi Materials, etc.

      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.

    • IWantToFuckSpez
      8•10 months ago

      While that’s true successful hostile takeovers by foreigners are rare in Japan. Japanese companies often implement a poison pill to thwart a takeover.

        • IWantToFuckSpez
          8•10 months ago

          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.