Japanese IT companies purchased overseas businesses.

The acquisition of Indeed —the World’s largest recruiting website

In 2012, Recruit Co., Ltd. acquired the world’s largest recruiting website, Indeed, with over 140 million unique visitors monthly.

Recruit is known for offering promotional services in a wide variety of fields, including human resources, dining, travel, beauty, housing, marriage, and college entry. Recruit is one of Japan’s leading companies, particularly in the human resources referral industry. The company is widely known under the names Rikunabi and Rikunabi Next—companies for the employment of new college graduates and changing jobs, respectively.

Indeed was established in the United States in 2004 and offers services in 28 languages and in over 54 countries. Utilizing an aggregate search model, a search engine searches for job listings scattered across the Internet, including job postings on corporate websites, allowing Indeed to offer an incredible amount of information.

Already serving as the largest human resources company in Japan, when Recruit acquired Indeed, it became the largest human resources company in the world.

Indeed have a data-driven corporate culture hardly seen before. Rather than operating a business by relying on intuition and the experience of engineers, designers and sales people, decisions are made using data collected based on user behavior.

After the acquisition of Indeed, this data-driven concept has started to be used by businesses other than just recruiting companies. The synergy resulting from the Indeed acquisition goes well beyond just the recruiting field.

ARM Acquisition by Softbank

On July 18, 2016, the Softbank Group announced the acquisition of ARM, the largest semiconductor design house in Great Britain, for approximately 3 trillion yen (24.3 billion pounds). Already having purchased Vodaphone Japan for 1.782 trillion yen and Sprint USA for 1.8 trillion yen, Softbank has been carrying out extremely extensive marketing and advertising in Japan, but this acquisition was even larger than either of those two.

ARM is a British company specializing in the design of semiconductors. ARM technology is widely used in the circuit designs of CPUs and telecommunication semiconductor devices used in smartphones.

With the acquisition of ARM, Softbank has made a highly strategic move in response to the new IoT (Internet of Things) age, where even things like cars and furniture are connected over the Internet. Because ARM processors will be used in far greater numbers than in just PCs and smartphones when the IoT age arrives in full force, this acquisition apparently anticipated such coming changes.

Both Recruit and Softbank are famous for their quick and responsive management, so of course it would take such companies to purchase overseas businesses.

After becoming listed on the Tokyo stock exchange in 2014, Recruit has started aggressively taking on overseas companies. Indeed, with a total overseas sales ratio of 25% in March 2015, Recruit will probably keep on expanding overseas in the future.