This comes from the FTC document leak. source

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
    15•1 year ago

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

    • sub_oEnglish
      23•1 year 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•1 year 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.

        • FreeFacts
          11•1 year ago

          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.

        • IWantToFuckSpez
          8•1 year 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.