Pole To Win Holdings to sell off AQUAPLUS

Pole To Win Holdings will sell off AQUAPLUS, a subsidiary of its media contents company HIKE, to a company outside of its group, the holdings company announced.

Negotiations are currently underway with several companies, but a decision has not yet been made. An announcement will be made as soon as the details have been finalized.

Here is the group’s reasoning for selling off AQUAPLUS:

Our Group provides quality consulting, game debugging, software testing, environment-building and transition support, monitoring, customer support, anti-fraud measures, and BPR support in the process of planning, developing, releasing, operating, and improving the lifecycle of customers’ services and products. This business is divided into three operations: Domestic Solutions, Overseas Solutions, and Media Contents.

Media Contents business is a new business that follows the core businesses of Domestic Solutions and Overseas Solutions. Our group has acquired subsidiaries such as SARUGAKUCHO Inc. in March 2010, QBIST Inc. in January 2015, CREST Inc. in November 2019, colorful Inc. in October 2020, Panda Graphics Inc. and Delfi Sound Inc. in August 2021, SANETTY Produce Co., Ltd. in November 2022, and AQUAPLUS Co., Ltd in December 2022. These well-known companies in the entertainment industry were integrated as HIKE Inc. (hereinafter referred to as HIKE) from February 2023, and ShiiTAKE DiGiTAL Ltd. was acquired as a subsidiary in January 2024.

AQUAPLUS is promoting to develop and sell games as a subsidiary of Media Contents’s core company, HIKE. The company’s remake version of ToHeart (PC / Nintendo Switch), which is scheduled to be released on June 26, 2025, has steadily increased its reservations. However, in line with the today’s announcement of “Notice of Changes (Transfer of Shares and Receivables) in Consolidated Subsidiaries (Specified Subsidiaries) and Occurrence of Extraordinary Profits and Extraordinary Losses,” in Media Contents business, including HIKE, in order to secure competitive positions in the growing industry and intensifying competition in the content industry, we recognize that we are in a business environment where we must continue to make more upfront investments than in the past, so we have resolved for a management buyout (MBO) by HIKE’s founder and current president and for the same reason, we have resolved to transfer shares outside of our group for AQUAPLUS.

AQUAPLUS was previously a subsidiary of HIKE, but rather than considering a transfer including HIKE that promotes 360-degree entertainment services for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business with a focus on intellectual properties, it was determined that a wider range of counterparties could consider the transfer of shares as a stand-alone game developer, which in turn would increase the possibility of transferring shares to a counterparty with prospects for greater synergy with AQUAPLUS. Accordingly, the Company has decided to make AQUAPLUS a direct subsidiary of the Company and to consider transferring shares of the company on a stand-alone basis. With regard to the transfer of AQUAPLUS shares, we are currently in the process of negotiating with a number of companies, but in order to expand the company’s business in the future, we will proceed with the transfer of shares to counterparties with more synergies.