An analysis said employees of Kioxia Holdings, a NAND flash maker that rose to No. 1 in Japan's stock market capitalization, have come to hold stock assets worth as much as 10 billion won per person.
According to Nikkei on the 28th, about 600 Kioxia employees are estimated to hold more than 1 billion yen (about 10 billion won) in assets per person. This is the result of not only executives but also rank-and-file employees receiving large stock options.
Kioxia, formerly Toshiba Memory, was acquired in 2018 by a consortium led by U.S. investment firm Bain Capital. At the time, Bain Capital granted stock options—typically awarded only to executives—to ordinary employees as well, and about 600 people are estimated to have shared 7 million shares of the company.
When Kioxia listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Dec. 2024, its IPO price was only 1,455 yen (about 13,800 won) per share, but the stock price soared to this year's high of 112,700 yen (about 1.07 million won) on the 22nd. As a result, Kioxia's market capitalization also swelled to about 7.9 trillion yen (about 75 trillion won).
If the roughly 7 million shares initially granted to employees are calculated at the year's high of 112,700 yen per share, the total value comes to about 790 billion yen. Dividing that by the estimated number of employees who received the shares at the time, it means a pre-tax per capita valuation gain of more than 1 billion yen (about 10 billion won), assuming they still hold the stock.
In Japan, cases of granting large stock options to ordinary employees as well as executives are rare. Nikkei analyzed that, in the past, stock compensation was a strategy at Japanese corporations to boost the motivation of Director General- and Director-level employees, who are de facto key personnel.