Advisory Company Co., LTD. (ADCO) was founded in 2009 by Akira Kondo, a former Representative Director and Senior Managing Director of Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Co.
Based on his extensive experience as head of the Investment Banking Division at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities, Mr. Kondo became aware of the importance of aligning corporate strategies and financial solutions such as M&A and financing in order for companies to maximize their business propositions.
Based on this belief, he established ADCO as a consulting company that takes a holistic approach and provide comprehensive solutions to leading companies.
Building on my six-year experience as the global head of investment banking at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities, I decided to start my own M&A boutique house in 2009, with the vision of establishing a company that could compete with the major investment banks, be truly useful to clients, and has long-lasting relationships with them.
ADCO’s principles
ADCO’s principles are founded on my experience at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities, when client relationships inevitably had to be crammed in a fixed (and often short) time span, and I often had to make proposals that emphasized our own profit goals, which resulted in forcing my clients to make short-term decisions that often did not lead to the best solutions. I have learned a bitter lesson, of losing the trust of clients.
When I started my own business, because of my principles, I found myself advising mostly on the side of the acquirer, which almost always takes longer, with lower probabilities of closing a deal, which was not easy for my business. Things did not go as planned, and for a while we worked on many potential leads that did not translate to our business revenue.
More than 10 years have passed since the company was established, and our fields of expertise have expanded to include steel, semiconductors, automotive parts, engineering, telecommunications, and nuclear power, etc. Our relationships with our clients have deepened, and our business has finally stabilized.
From the beginning, we believed that a small to medium-sized M&A boutique house such as ours would not be able to differentiate itself from our competitors in terms of scope and variety if we purely focused on domestic deals. Consequently, we dedicated ourselves to building an overseas network mainly outside of China and the US where it is too crowded, and set our eyes first on Southeast Asia and Australia. We now have partners and partner companies in Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. We are seeing the fruition of this in the form of recent deals, where we have been able to provide a wide variety of projects channeled through our extensive network in Southeast Asia.
In the field of consulting, in order to excel in niche areas, we refer to advanced case studies in Europe and introduce them to our clients in Japan. As there are only a few Japanese consulting companies working in Europe, we work closely with European consulting companies particular in the fields of nuclear power, water, new energy and renewable energy. I believe that we are probably the only company in Japan that provides consulting services in the field of nuclear energy, especially in the decommissioning business.
By taking advantage of our company's unique characteristics, we are determined to do everything we can to become a company that our clients entrust to say, "ADCO will provide you with a solution to your problem – and that may or may not include M&A proposals”
We look forward to your continued patronage.
