Merchant Bankers stepped up its share repurchase programme in May, buying back 1,276,000 common shares for ¥275,253,000 on a trade-date basis through market purchases on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. That brought cumulative repurchases under the current programme to 2,618,000 shares worth ¥591,344,100 as of June 1, against a ceiling of 4,100,000 shares, equal to 13.6% of shares outstanding excluding treasury stock, and ¥820,000,000 running from January 30 to December 11. As of June 1, the company held 2,697,706 treasury shares out of 32,806,190 issued shares.
Why the TIGEREYE filing matters
The buyback update is more revealing when read alongside Merchant Bankers' separate June 1 disclosure on TIGEREYE. The board said it plans to acquire 945 TIGEREYE shares, or 21.0% of voting rights, in July via transfer reservation agreements with eight shareholders, making the AI company an equity-method affiliate. The acquisition price and other conditions are still scheduled to be fixed during June, with further disclosure to follow once terms are set.
That link is explicit in the company's own wording. Merchant Bankers said it is moving beyond a model centred on rent-producing real-estate investments and is strengthening M&A and equity investments in businesses with better profitability, future potential and growth prospects. It also said it has been repurchasing its own shares for use as acquisition funding in M&A. In plain English, the buyback is being framed as part capital allocation, part deal plumbing.
Merchant Bankers described TIGEREYE as a developer of AI control technology combining vision, audio and language, with products such as facial-recognition systems and conversational avatars. It said TIGEREYE has a service-development partnership with Kokuyo based on joint patents, plus cooperation with KDDI Technologies, SoftBank Robotics and Hitachi Systems. The filing also said Merchant Bankers has no existing capital, personnel or business relationship with TIGEREYE, and that the investment's effect on results for the year ending October 2026 should be minor at this stage.
What is still missing
The biggest gap is valuation. Merchant Bankers said TIGEREYE's financial results and financial position are undisclosed under a confidentiality agreement, and the purchase price remains undecided. So investors can now see the pace of the buyback and the direction of strategy, but not yet the economics of the AI investment being paired with it.