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Fujisankei Group

Overview

This profile considers the Fujisankei group of Japan.

Introduction

Fujisankei is a broadcast, film, press, direct marketing, retail, museum management and property development conglomerate.

It claims to be one of the world's largest media groups.

Like competitors such as Yomiuri and Asahi most revenue comes from activity within Japan.

The group

Fujisankei Communications Group (FCG) comprises around 100 companies concerned with television, newspaper, radio, book and magazine publishing, music and video production, direct marketing, property and museum management. It is a loose keiretsu founded by the Shikanai family. The family saw its management control dissipate in the early 1990s. An indication of the holdings is here.

Its Nippon Broadcasting System is a dominant player in Japan's radio industry, with 37 stations, and one of the world's largest radio broadcasting networks. Its major arm is the National Radio Network (NRN); other units include the Nippon Cultural Broadcasting Group.

Nippon Broadcasting has a major stake in Fuji Television. Fuji TV has 28 domestic stations, 20 overseas offices and a 30% stake in interactive broadcasting venture Satellite Service. It claims to broadcast to around 98% of the Japanese population.

The group's flagship newspaper is The Sankei Shimbun, Japan's second-largest national daily with a circulation of around two million. Other Sankei-affiliated newspapers include the daily Sankei Sports, the tabloid Fuji Evening News, the Japan Industrial Journal, the free Sankei Living Shimbun and regional Osaka Shimbun. Magazine imprints include women's magazine ESSE, men's weekly SPA!, Caz biweekly for young women, JUNIE and Atarashii Sumai no Sekkei.

The Pony Canyon Group engages in the production, promotion, and merchandising of compact disks, cassette tapes, feature films (with Fuji TV) and concert videocassettes, computer games and CD-ROMs. Fujisankei Living Service is one of Japan's largest mail-order companies.

Sankei Building and affiliated companies are active in property development, leasing and management in Tokyo, Osaka and Hiroshima.

The Shikanais collect trophy art - in particular sculpture by Rodin, Hepworth and Calder. The group operates several museums housing the collections: the Hakone Open-Air Museum, the Utsukushi-ga-hara Open-Air Museum near the Japan Alps and Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo.

Like Matsushita and other Japanese conglomerates, Fujisankei's expansion offshore through acquisition of production facilities and rights in Europe and the Americas has had indifferent success. The group acquired but disposed of two music catalogues, notably Branson's Virgin Music.

Sankei Shimbun

The Japan Media Review indicates that the right-of-centre Sankei Shimbun ranks sixth in daily newspaper circulation in Japan (second as a business daily) with 2.17 million copies of the morning edition and 636,649 of the evening edition. Over 63% of the heads of households that read Sankei are older than 50. It was founded in 1933 as the Nihon Kogyo Shimbun (Industry & Business), becoming the Sankei Shimbun in 1942 through a merger with regional titles.

Sister publication, the evening Yukan Fuji, sells 640,000 copies. Sankei Sports, Japan's top selling sports paper, was founded in 1955 and has a circulation of 820,000.

Livedoor

In 2005 Takafumi Horie's Livedoor acquired a major stake in Nippon Broadcasting System (which had a substantial stake in the much larger Fuji Television). Livedoor was a high profile internet conglomerate with interests ranging from online content production to brokerage, consumer credit, mail order retailing and management of used car dealerships.

The Livedoor move, apparently funded by debt, was regarded by Nippon and Fuji as hostile. It resulted in litigation as Fuji sought to increase its stake in Nippon to ensure that Livedoor did not gain control of both broadcasters and the Shikanais disputed onsale by Daiwa Securities SMBC of part of their stake in Nippon.

Livedoor subsequently agreed to sell its controlling stake in NBS to Fuji Television for a notional profit of 300m yen (US$2.8m), issuing new shares - around 13% of its total shares outstanding - to Fuji for 44bn yen (US$415m) in a private offering.

Horie commented that

"People ask me if I am another Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch is the chairman of a media conglomerate. But we are planning to become a media, IT and financial conglomerate."

Those ambitions were somewhat derailed after Horie's offices and residences were raided by Japanese officials in January 2006 in conjunction with claims that he had breached the nation's securities regime. He was arrested for fraud in 2006.

Yoshiaki Murakami's MAC Asset Management Inc investment fund allegedly acquired shares in Nippon Broadcasting after Horie told him that Livedoor intended to make a takeover bid. Prosecutors at Murakami's insider trading trial in 2006 claimed that his fund bought 9.95 billion yen of Nippon Broadcasting shares after his meeting with Horie and sold them for a 3 billion yen profit days after Livedoor announced its bid.

In 2006 Livedoor reported a loss of 40.84 billion yen (US$352m) on annual group sales of 137.91 billion yen. It also unloaded its financial services unit, which had provided 80% of the group's profit.

Studies

There is no major English-language study of the Shikanai family or Fujisankei.

For the group's early history see Gregory Kasza's The State & The Mass Media in Japan 1918-1945 (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1988). A perspective on more recent developments is provided by Laurie Freeman's Closing the Shop: Information Cartels and Japan’s Mass Media (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2000) and the essays in Media and Politics in Japan (Honolulu: Uni of Hawaii Press 1996) edited by Susan Pharr & Ellis Krauss. Mass Communication in Japan (Ames: Iowa State Press 1997) by Anne Cooper-Chen offers insights regarding consumption.

For Richard Branson see Mick Brown's Richard Branson: The Inside Story (London: Michael Joseph 1988), Tom Bower's Branson (London: Fourth Estate 2000) and Tim Jackson's Virgin King (New York: HarperCollins 1994). Branson's own Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography (London: Virgin 1998) is a long advertorial.