Apollo Buys the Keys to a Glassmaker, and Japan's Deal Season Keeps Rolling

Itochu's investment vehicle, Godo Kaisha VIC, will pay ¥2,880 a share to take Dentsu Soken private, but not all the way: Dentsu Group has signed a non-tender agreement promising not to sell its 61.78% stake (120,779,736 shares) and to vote for a follow-on share consolidation that squeezes out anyone who doesn't tender. The result folds the dentsu Japan consulting and systems-integration unit into a new joint venture between Itochu and Dentsu Group, delisting Dentsu Soken from the Tokyo Stock Exchange in the process.

Why it matters: This is a genuine control transaction at a household-name advertising and IT group, not a routine alliance announcement: minority shareholders get bought out at a fixed price while the controlling parent stays in for the long haul as a joint-venture partner with Itochu.

Ichibanya and House Foods Group both filed near-identical notices on August 31 confirming they are reviewing options for the CoCo Ichibanya operator that include taking it private, after Nikkei's digital edition reported that House Foods was selling its stake as part of a buyout. Neither company will verify the Nikkei report itself, and both say no facts have been concretely decided.

Why it matters: The companies have confirmed they are studying a go-private option for a household-name curry chain, even as the specific stake-sale mechanics reported by Nikkei remain unconfirmed.

SBI Holdings opened a tender offer on August 31 for up to 23,792,300 BASE shares, a hard cap equal to 20.00% under the deal's own share-count method, paying ¥340 a share after two rounds of price increases prompted by pushback from the e-commerce platform. There is no minimum acceptance threshold, and if more shares are tendered than the cap allows, SBI will buy pro rata rather than let its stake run past 20%.

The move: SBI structured this specifically to create an affiliate-level stake, not a takeover, a distinction that matters for BASE's independence and for shareholders deciding whether to tender.

Twin Bird's board voted unanimously on August 31 to oppose Japanet Holdings' planned ¥800-a-share tender offer to take the appliance maker fully private, filing a formal notice of opposition via TDnet. The offer had been structured with a condition precedent requiring a favorable opinion from Twin Bird's own board, and Japanet has said it will withdraw entirely if it doesn't get one.

What to watch: Japanet has set October 30 as the deadline for that board opinion; without it, the offer lapses, leaving Japanet to either raise its price or walk away.

Fuji Die, Japan's top maker of tungsten carbide wear-resistant tools and dies, cut its full-year sales forecast by 6.2% to ¥24.4bn while raising its profit outlook, a split it traces to a Chinese export freeze on tungsten now in its tenth month. The freeze has pushed the benchmark tungsten price up roughly tenfold, letting Fuji Die pass costs through to customers even as domestic order volumes fall faster than expected.

The number: A single Chinese export restriction is moving both lines of a Japanese manufacturer's income statement at once, lifting margins on tungsten it can still source while shrinking the market for tools that use it.

Tri Chemical Laboratories raised its full-year profit guidance to ¥6.57bn for the year to January 2027, up from the ¥4.6bn forecast it issued in March, after first-half results ran well ahead of plan. The company points to stronger chipmaker capital spending in China and Taiwan and higher Korean memory output as the drivers.

Read-through: A 43% guidance increase at a specialty chemicals supplier is a direct read on how much of the AI chip investment cycle is actually reaching Japanese suppliers' order books, not just chipmakers' own capex announcements.

Honda and Nissan signed a binding joint development contract on August 31 to make the core computing hardware and software inside their next-generation vehicles common to both companies, targeting deployment from fiscal 2029. The companies disclosed only a minor financial impact for the year to March 2027 and gave no synergy figure.

Why it matters: Two rival automakers are standardizing the core ECUs and software architecture underneath their vehicles, a deeper form of cooperation than the alliance talk of recent years.

REVOLUTION unwound its crowdfunding business on August 31, selling the subsidiary that ran it, WeCapital, to one of its own board members for ¥1mn after no outside buyer emerged. The same day, the company withdrew its full-year earnings guidance and its mid-term plan entirely, saying it can no longer say what this year's profit will look like.

Why it matters: The sale and guidance withdrawal land while REVOLUTION carries a Tokyo Stock Exchange special-attention designation, and the company says its internal investigation committee's report had not yet reached it as of the evening of August 31, leaving the probe still open.