For more than five decades, the loudest voice at Nidec belonged to the man who started it. As of last week, the biggest stake belongs to someone else. The Nidec Nagamori story has reached a strange point: the company is preparing to seek damages from its founder, Shigenobu Nagamori, while a hedge fund pushes it toward a sale that he could help decide.
A new largest shareholder
On Oct. 14, Seth Fischer, founder of the Hong Kong fund Oasis Management, told Bloomberg his fund had become Nidec’s largest shareholder. Oasis has since disclosed a 9% stake. Nagamori directly owns about 8.3%, according to Bloomberg data.
Oasis is an activist investor. That means it buys a meaningful stake and then pushes management to change something: the board, the strategy, or in this case the ownership itself. On Oct. 7, Oasis asked Nidec’s outside directors to hire financial advisers and start collecting early, non-binding buyout offers, as protection in case the company is forced off the stock market.
The Nidec Nagamori knot
Two days after Fischer’s interview, a committee of outside lawyers gave Nidec’s board its verdict. It found that Nagamori and several former top executives bear civil liability for years of improper accounting, and Nidec said it would consider claims for damages. The names include former CEOs Jun Seki and Mitsuya Kishida, former chairman Hiroshi Kobe and former president Hiroyuki Yoshimoto. Nidec said it would publish a partly redacted version of the report on Oct. 20.
Here is the problem. If Nidec is eventually sold, the buyer has to price three things at once: the legal claims, the unfinished audit, and whether Nagamori, still one of the largest shareholders, would support the deal. Bloomberg made exactly that point on Monday. Nagamori gave up his last formal title at Nidec in February. His shares did not leave with the title.
Why delisting is even on the table
A little background, because the Tokyo terms can be confusing.
Since October 2025, Nidec has been a “security on special alert” on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Think of it as probation. The exchange has told the company that its internal controls, the checks that stop bad numbers from reaching the books, need fixing. If the exchange decides they are still broken, the stock can be removed from the market.
The second problem is the auditor. PwC Japan withheld its opinion on Nidec’s accounts, saying it could not get enough reliable evidence. Without an auditor’s sign-off, investors can’t trust the numbers, and neither can the exchange. Nidec is trying to get that sign-off and file a report with the exchange by Oct. 28 to avoid a delisting notice. That date is a filing deadline, not the day the exchange rules on the stock.
The cleanup has been expensive. For the year that ended in March, Nidec booked a ¥632 billion impairment, which is a write-down admitting that some assets are worth far less than the books claimed, and it posted a ¥519 billion operating loss. An impairment doesn’t burn cash on the day it is booked (here is how a non-cash impairment works). What it does tell you is how much value past decisions had already lost.
Investors have noticed. Nidec shares fell to their lowest level since 2016 on Monday and have lost more than a third of their value since late September, when CEO Mitsuya Kishida suddenly resigned. The company is now worth about ¥2.1 trillion, against almost ¥9 trillion less than six years ago.
A handover that never really happened
Nagamori built Nidec through decades of aggressive acquisitions and a high-pressure culture. He also struggled to let go. Yoshimoto and Seki were each lined up as possible successors, and each left while Nagamori kept his influence. Compare that with Berkshire Hathaway, which spent years telling shareholders who would come next, down to who would chair the board.
That history is why the legal fight matters beyond the courtroom. A founder who never fully stepped away is now the person the company may sue, and also a shareholder any buyer will want on side.
What to watch
- Oct. 28: whether Nidec files its report with the auditor’s sign-off.
- The exchange’s ruling on whether internal controls are fixed, which may come later.
- The damage claims: whether Nidec actually files them, and against whom.
- Oasis’s next step: Nikkei reported the fund may call an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting to reshape the board.
My take: Nidec can take its founder to court. It can’t take him off the shareholder list.
Not advice. Just how I see it.