game trailblazer

Chapter 137 Capcom's Crisis
The survey report sent by the Blue Information Market Research Company was about the RBG game market. When Zhang Lexing met Chen Zishan for the first time, he accidentally mentioned "Resident Evil" and remembered Capcom by the way, so Just ask the blue information market research company to focus on it.The main content of the investigation report sent now is the recent situation of Capcom. Sure enough, as Zhang Lexing expected, Capcom has been involved in the vortex of crisis.

Capcom was established in May 1979 by the founder Kenzo Tsujimoto. At that time, the name was still called "IRM". Tatio) contracted "Space Invaders", Capcom has achieved rapid development, and has also introduced many investors, such as motor and liquid crystal display equipment manufacturing company NANAO became the largest shareholder of "IRM", and even Capcom Yoshihiko Kodo, the founder of New RB Project (the predecessor of SNK, which was officially renamed SNK in 5), was one of the main competitors of Sora.Because of the huge profits in the foundry business, the company's second largest shareholder Kenzo Tsujimoto was elected as the president.

In 1982, after capital expansion, IRM Co., Ltd. changed its name to IREM and began to plan to develop its own arcade games. However, serious internal divisions soon occurred. The main reason was that each established a new company for personal gain in the business of the club. , As a result, there was serious friction between Kenzo Tsujimoto and Yoshihiko Kodo.At the beginning, Kenzo Tsujimoto gained the upper hand by virtue of his status as the president, but Yoshihiko Kodo quickly fought back at the shareholders meeting. As a result, Kenzo Tsujimoto was forced to resign, and Yoshihiko Kodo became the new president of IREM.Since then, Kenzo Tsujimoto and Yoshihiko Kodo have formed a deep hatred. Many years later, there have been many malicious poaching incidents between their companies, which has become an anecdote in the industry.

After resigning from the position of president, Kenzo Tsujimoto left IREM with his confidantes, and established a new company Capcom in June 1983. This is the day when Capcom officially appeared.At the beginning, Capcom had only 6 regular employees, but with the keen insight of Kenzo Tsujimoto and the pillars of Funamizu Noriko, Okamoto Yoshiki and Fujiwara Tokuro who joined the company successively, Capcom began to develop rapidly. Successively achieved success in arcade machines and FC (Nintendo Famicom), and even gradually suppressed Kodo Yoshihiko (who has mastered the two clubs of SNK and IREM) with stronger financial resources.

In 1988, the CPS10 arcade substrate developed by Capcom, which cost 1 billion yen for two years, went on the market. Later, based on this substrate, it developed "Great Demon Village", "Famous General", "Swallowing Heaven and Earth", "Quick Whirlwind" " and many other classic works have become a big gold digging tool for Capcom.

In 1991, Capcom's revolutionary new product "Street Fighter II" was launched. It didn't cause much trouble at the beginning. With BOSS and no miscellaneous soldiers, it is not fun to fight.Later, some people gradually discovered the fun of playing against people, which is completely incomparable with the stupid computer AI, and finally formed an irresistible storm of arcade popularity, and many teenagers who were addicted to home machines lost Put down the handle and rush into the nearby arcade hall to experience this revolutionary game. For a while, the streets and alleys resounded with the voices of children shouting "Haoyougan".Taking this as an opportunity, it triggered a big boom in fighting games, and many manufacturers also took the opportunity to follow suit and launched many similar products, such as SNK's "Legend of Hungry Wolf".Among them, DATAEAST is the most excessive. Not only did it launch a setting very similar to "History of Fighters", even the main programmer of the game was poached from Capcom, and a protracted lawsuit began. In the end, DATAEAST lost the lawsuit, and "The History of the Fighter" was blocked (in fact, it was nothing).

Seeing other companies’ counterfeit products one after another, Tsujimoto Kenzo couldn’t sit still. Under his instruction, Capcom also launched multiple versions of “Street Fighter II” one after another. The first ones to be launched were DASH and The two versions of TURBO achieved quite good results again. Encouraged by this, "Super Street Fighter II-THE NEW CHALLENGERS" was also launched soon, but because it was a rush work, the balance was greatly affected.However, Capcom was not discouraged, and soon came up with "Super Street Fighter IIX-GRANDMASTER CHALLENGE", which is known as the ultimate completed form. The biggest change is the addition of speed adjustment settings and a super hidden character Goki.In addition, Capcom did not waste this popular theme in the home console market, and successively launched different versions of "Street Fighter II" on SFC (Super Nintendo), Sega MD and 3DO consoles.At this time, in the early days of the business, Kenzo Tsujimoto praised him so much that "creative skills" had been completely forgotten, and only the word "making money" remained.

In 1994, Capcom’s performance began to take a turn for the worse. Due to the frequent launch of the “Street Fighter II” series and the release of a large number of similar products from other manufacturers, the market finally became seriously saturated, resulting in millions of cassettes being piled up. No one cared about them in the warehouse, especially in the European and American markets. Tsujimoto Kenzo had to order the destruction of these unsalable products, and the resulting direct losses exceeded tens of millions of dollars, and even the "Wall Street Journal" News of Capcom's giant steamroller crushing the cassette was published, and Capcom's stock price plummeted.

……

At the same time, the new Capcom office building at No. 1-3, Hirano-cho 150-[-], Chuo-ku, Osaka City was silent. Everyone walking in the building was cautious, especially the newcomers who hadn’t been employed for a long time. Saying it out, there is no way that the boss Tsujimoto is angry, but he can't let him grab his pigtail at this time.In the office of the president on the top floor of the building, Kenzo Tsujimoto looked at the report in his hand. He felt no joy in his heart when he gained a net profit of [-] billion yen last year, nor did he feel the joy when the company's stock was listed on the Osaka Exchange last year. I am full of ambition, and I don't have the feeling that everything is under control when I spend money to build the company's office building, only frustration and pain remain.It's only been a year, and I didn't expect such a big change. The game cartridges that the company spent a lot of money to produce turned into garbage in the warehouse in a blink of an eye. In the end, I had to spend money to rent a steamroller to crush these cards. Where were the cassettes pressed? It was clearly piles of dollars. Every time I think of this incident, Tsujimoto Kenzo feels his heart dripping blood.

The company encountered some troubles, but it did not expect the employees under it to be unsafe.That Tokuro Fujiwara is the most hateful. Thinking about the layoffs in Konami, he and Yoshiki Okamoto were very depressed. If Ken Tsujimoto hadn’t shown kindness to recruit them in, they might have starved to death.After entering the company, Kenzo Tsujimoto also entrusted the two with important tasks, each in charge of a development team.At first, "VULGUS" and "SONSON" produced by the two development teams did not satisfy Tsujimoto Kenzo, but he still supported them very much, and even wrote a banner of "Creative Kung Fu" in Chinese characters to encourage them.Unexpectedly, now that the company encountered temporary difficulties, Tokuro Fujiwara handed in his resignation immediately. Kenzo Tsujimoto had no intention of retaining such a person who wanted to be a deserter, and agreed to his resignation with a swipe of a pen.Unexpectedly, Tokuro Fujiwara went away by himself, and even took away the backbone of his original department, and started a new game development club WhoopeeCamp. I heard that Sony even invested in them.With Tokuro Fujiwara doing this, Capcom became even more panicked. Many people chose to leave one after another. As a result, many development projects of the company were affected, and even completely shut down. rain.

In fact, in Tsujimoto Kenzo's view, the company's troubles are not that big, but it's just that there are too many loans.When the building was being built, not everyone agreed with it with both hands, and even fought for the allocation of offices. At that time, no one thought that the loan was too much.If it weren't for the backlog of those cassettes, the money invested would not be recovered, and there would be no problem at all with repaying the loan in installments.The same goes for those banks. They all begged Capcom to do business with them when they took out the loan last year. Now it’s just a small problem. I can’t even ask them to extend the loan period. I want them to convert the loan into The company's shares are even more evasive.

"They're all a bunch of hateful things!" Kenzo Tsujimoto threw the report on the table and said angrily.

……

After reading the survey report sent by the Blue Information market research company, Zhang Lexing has a certain understanding of the crisis Capcom is facing. Simply put, Capcom's loan cannot be repaid on schedule. The fundamental reason is that the president moved. Ben Kenzo forgot the previous successful experience (the company's profits were mainly used to open arcade business centers and invest in the development of new arcade boards, rather than building office buildings or squandering them), and the company's stock listing was a bit floundering, so the loan I started the company's office building construction plan, but it happened to catch up with the game cassette backlog, so it became what it is now.

Capcom’s major crisis is not the only one. Zhang Lexing remembers that in 2003, there was another crisis that was more serious than now. The culprit was the Tsujimoto family headed by the president Kenzo Tsujimoto. The funds were used for purposes other than game development, and President Kenzo Tsujimoto even made a lot of failed investments in real estate, which eventually led to a huge deficit of nearly 2003 billion yen in Capcom's financial settlement in March 3 , In order to repay the debt, a large number of assets, including the Capcom Building, had to be mortgaged and sold. Shinji Mikami, the main creator of the "Resident Evil" series, took the blame and resigned as the head of the Fourth Development Department, and Yoshiki Okamoto, the company's veteran, quit the company in anger.

For Capcom, Zhang Lexing has admired it for a long time. The long list of classic works on the arcade is enough to make people salivate.In Zhang Lexing's memory, Capcom's crisis finally vanished invisible, which may have been the result of Kenzo Tsujimoto's efforts. Of course, the unexpected success of "Resident Evil" also played a considerable role in this.However, since Zhang Lexing had his eyes on Capcom, he naturally wouldn't wait for Kenzo Tsujimoto to make a move. Taking advantage of the internal turmoil in Capcom, it is the best time to win.

So Zhang Lexing picked up the phone to contact Mai Jiajun who had just completed a business merger and was on vacation, and then faxed a copy of the information he had in hand.

After reading the information, Mai Jiajun called back: "Lexing, there should be a possibility of acquisition of this company. I'll ask someone to check Capcom's shareholding structure. Currently, there are about 44.81 people in the hands of the Tsujimoto family. 2.6%, from this point of view, there is still hope for more than half. Moreover, due to many unfavorable news, the stock price of Capcom is at the lowest point in the near future, and the cost of acquisition is relatively low. I estimated that it is about [-]% It's almost [-] million US dollars. Lexing, do you have a part of the equity in Traveler Group?"

"Well, there are about 35% of the shares in it, and that was invested many years ago. Why, does this matter have something to do with the Traveler Group?"

"Lexing, sometimes I really admire your investment vision. I heard from Xiner that you only invested 400 million US dollars in it back then. Do you know how many times it has doubled now?"

Of course Zhang Lexing knew it, otherwise he would not have tried his best to establish a relationship with Sandy Weir back then. The Travelers Group is not too strong now, and it will become a real financial behemoth after it merges into Citigroup in a few years. The reason why Zhang Lexing wanted to bring Mai Jiajun over was actually to find someone who was familiar with finance and more reliable to speak for him.

Mai Jiajun's voice came again from the receiver: "Le Xing, according to my research, the Voyager Group currently owns about 12.06% of Capcom's shares. I believe that with the current market conditions and your relationship, it should be easy. Take this part."

"I think it should be. If necessary, I can call Sandy. If the price is reasonable, I believe he will be happy to transfer it."

"I'll contact him first. If we can't agree, let's talk. Lexing, do you have any other requests?"

"I only have two points. First, we must control Capcom, and second, the Tsujimoto family must be out." In Zhang Lexing's view, the Tsujimoto family is like a cancer to Capcom. If they are not cleared out Sooner or later, Capcom will be dragged down. Zhang Lexing doesn't want them to create a huge deficit of tens of billions of yen in the future.

The voice of Mai Jiajun breathing came from the phone. It seemed that this request was a bit difficult. After a while, Mai Jiajun’s voice came from the receiver again: "Le Xing, the first request is fine, the second one is fine. It will be more difficult, but I will try my best to do it well. I will prepare the contract tomorrow, and you can arrange someone to come to my office to have a look at it. If there is no problem, we can start work after signing the contract."

"Okay, I'll arrange someone right away, and I will come to your office as soon as possible, waiting for your good news!"

"No problem, within a month, you can see Capcom's equity transfer agreement."

After hanging up the phone, Zhang Lexing dialed the number of Hua Ziqing, the general manager of Orient Holdings, and asked him to arrange for someone to come to Mai Jiajun's office to sign the contract as soon as possible.

When Tsujimoto Kenzo was still worrying about how to solve the predicament he was facing, he never thought that his company had been targeted by others, and the acquisition of Capcom by Orient Holdings was quietly kicked off...

(End of this chapter)