“I'm not sure how I feel about my wealth,” one of Japan's youngest billionaires told Time magazine from his Tokyo office. “But we will continue to work hard to create a good business.”
Shunsaku Sagami, 33 years old, owes a fortune.forbes His net worth was recently estimated to be $1.9 billion. This is especially true for businesses that support other businesses.
“From an early age, I wanted to be someone who could solve the world’s problems,” he says.
One of the issues Mr. Sagami identified in his own life was the challenge of business succession in a country where the elderly far outnumber the young. Mr. Sagami often talks about his late grandfather, who ran a real estate company in his hometown of Osaka, but after he retired, he was forced to close down because he couldn't find a suitable successor. .
After selling his startup, Sagami founded M&A Research Institute in 2018, a mergers and acquisitions advisory firm that uses artificial intelligence to match buyers and sellers. The company specializes in connecting older owners and CEOs of small businesses with successors, ensuring they don't have to follow the same unfortunate path as his grandfather. “Japan's aging problem is serious, and I think it's the most serious in the world,” Sagami says.
In 2019, the Japanese government announced that by 2025, more than 1.25 million small and medium-sized business owners over the age of 70 will have no succession plan and approximately 6.5 million jobs will be at risk if they fail to leave their jobs. It is predicted that the economy will be hit hard. Worldwide, it exceeds $100 billion.
Last year, Sagami's company similarly estimated that approximately 620,000 profitable companies in Japan were at risk of closing due to lack of successors.
This is where Sagami's unique AI-powered matching system comes into play. He is committed to working quickly and only charging clients after a deal is closed, unlike his peers who charge upfront and whose service he considers too slow and inefficient. I'm proud of it. And so far, M&A, which will be listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2022, has been a huge success.
The firm, which currently employs more than 300 people and is working on about 400 transactions at any given time, closed its doors last year in response to requests from clients who had sold businesses and needed help managing newly acquired assets. The more they diversified into management, the better their results were. . Mr. Sagami is also looking to expand his major brokerage business internationally, knowing that Japan is not the only country grappling with the issue of heir absence.
“The strength of my company's matching service is that it is language agnostic,” he says. “If given the opportunity, we would like to use the services that M&A has developed here in Japan to help other countries in a similar way.”
—Report by Lillian Loescher/Osaka
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