Word: ripplewood
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...firm inspires public outrage like $4 billion Ripplewood, thanks largely to its taste for companies that evoke Japanese national pride. Ripplewood in 1999 became the first foreign firm to buy out a Japanese bank?Long-Term Credit Bank, the fifth largest in the country. Last year it snapped up the biggest share in?and effective control of?Nippon Columbia, the 92-year-old record label whose name is synonymous with enka (Japanese folk ballads). Then Ripplewood bought out Seagaia, a sprawling golf-and-beach resort on the southern island of Kyushu that plays host to Japan's best-known golf...
...Japanese companies always prefer to sell to other Japanese companies," says Dean Yoost, CEO of a PricewaterhouseCoopers division in Tokyo that advises on mergers and acquisitions. The foreigner is the buyer of last resort. That means the price is often right: Ripplewood paid $130 million for Seagaia (with a commitment to invest $100 million)?a total that is only 8% of the $3 billion it cost to build the resort, which opened in 1994. But Ripplewood faces a turnaround task that is the corporate equivalent of raising the dead...
...record label Nippon Columbia, Ripplewood's task was less to redefine the business than to get back to it. Over the years the company had simply stopped producing hits, relying for sales revenue on the albums of enka queen Hibari Misora?who died in 1989. Nippon Columbia owned Denon, an audio-equipment maker, and odd assets such as real estate and golf memberships. The staff was bloated, the headquarters stuffy, and the company had not turned a profit in 10 years...
...Collins hired a renowned industry talent, Strauss Zelnick, former ceo of BMG Entertainment, who in turn hired a respected Japanese record exec to scout for new pop and rock acts. Ripplewood spun off Denon and other noncore assets and slashed the staff. The building also underwent a makeover, with Sheryl Crow on video screens in the lobby alongside posters of young artists like Kiyoshi Hikawa and Charcoal Filter...
...Collins turned Ripplewood's renamed Phoenix Seagaia Resort over to his fly-fishing buddy Michael Glennie, who had run the Boca Raton Resort and Club and the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, but who concedes that "this is a different challenge." Seagaia boasts five golf courses, four hotels and a convention center on six miles of Pacific coastline. It offers bowling, tennis and riding. It also has a water park called the Ocean Dome that costs $5 million a year to operate and includes simulated waves lapping at a beach made of imported crushed marble...