Private Equity and Japan: What a Take-Private Means for the Japan Business and the Leader Who Runs It

The Country Manager
Written by Murray Clarke

Private equity now owns a large part of enterprise software. Thoma Bravo bought Anaplan for about $10.4 billion, Coupa for about $8 billion and Darktrace for about $5.3 billion. Hellman & Friedman and Permira took Zendesk private for about $10.2 billion. Silver Lake bought Qualtrics for $12.5 billion. Francisco Partners and TPG bought New Relic for about $6.5 billion. Insight Partners bought Veeam for $5 billion, and EQT has owned SUSE twice. Smartsheet, Alteryx and Zuora went the same way.

Every one of these companies has a business in Japan. The plan behind each deal was written at headquarters, usually in a growth, margin and exit model with Japan as one line in the international number. What actually happens in Japan depends on the person running it.

I've been hiring Country Managers in Tokyo since 2003. This post looks at what the public record shows about these companies in Japan since their deals, and what it means for the leader you put in charge.

Why Japan matters to the exit

Japan is worth getting right, and the timing is good. We keep the numbers updated in our Why Japan? Why Now? research. A few that matter most to an owner:

  • The yen. At around ¥156 to the dollar, the same yen salary costs about 30% less in dollars than it did at the 2020 average of ¥107. A Japan team costs a lot less to build than it did when most of these deals were modelled.

  • Cloud. IDC Japan puts public cloud spending at ¥4.49 trillion in 2025, up 20.3%, and forecasts ¥10.1 trillion by 2030. About 80% of large and mid-sized companies still run legacy systems.

  • AI. AI spending in Japan was ¥2.37 trillion in 2025 and IDC forecasts ¥6.89 trillion by 2029. Japan's 2026 white paper found 86.4% of companies use generative AI in at least one process, up from 55.2% in the previous edition.

  • People. 85.5% of companies told IPA they don't have enough people for digital transformation (DX). Japan's working population is shrinking, so companies have to automate. METI has warned for years that old systems could cost the economy up to ¥12 trillion a year, which it calls the 2025年の崖 (nisen-nijūgo-nen no gake), the "2025 digital cliff".

Japan can also be a large share of a software company's revenue. Box earned 21% of its global revenue in Japan in the year to January 2024. New Relic's CEO said in February 2025 that Japan is its largest and fastest-growing market in Asia-Pacific, and that Asia-Pacific is about 30% of the business.

That matters because these owners are heading for an exit. SailPoint came back to Nasdaq in February 2025, raising about $1.38 billion about two and a half years after Thoma Bravo took it private. Veeam sold $2 billion of shares at a $15 billion valuation in December 2024, a step widely read as preparation for an IPO. In January 2026 Reuters reported that Anaplan could file confidentially for an IPO. In March 2026 Reuters reported EQT was exploring a sale of SUSE at up to about $6 billion. An international growth story is easier to tell with a working Japan business in it.

Japanese investors are paying attention too. Bain reports that private equity deal value in Japan reached ¥4.8 trillion in 2025, against ¥3.1 trillion in 2024, with a median return of 31% against 22% in the US.

Japan moves on its own clock

The deal model runs on quarters. Japan doesn't. Enterprise buyers here take longer to decide, they start small, and they expect the vendor to still be around in ten years. A first deal in Japan is often a proof of concept for a much larger one, and the size of that first order says little about what comes next. We've written more about this in Why are the deal sizes in Japan so small?

That creates a gap between what HQ expects and what Japan delivers, and it shows up in public. In October 2023, on Zendesk's tenth anniversary in Japan, CEO Tom Eggemeier said Japan was one of Zendesk's top five markets. In November 2025 he said Japan ranked eighth globally in sales and he wanted it back in the top five. The two statements may measure different things, but the message to the Japan team is clear.

New Relic set a target in 2023 of 50,000 Japan users by 2025. In April 2026 it reported more than 38,000. Over the same period it held the top market share in Japanese observability, at 43% in 2025. Both of those things are true at once, and a good Japan leader has to explain both to the owners.

This is where the Country Manager matters most. Someone has to make the case to HQ for what Japan needs: either fight for headcount, partners and patience, or reset expectations before the numbers do it for you. Too many companies hire a body to tick the box. What they need is a leader the board will listen to when the news from Japan isn't what it wanted to hear.

Four situations, four kinds of leader

When an owner calls us about a Japan hire, the first conversation isn't about candidates. It's about what Japan actually needs to get done in the next three years. Most situations fall into one of four groups, and each needs a different profile.

1. Finishing a move to cloud or to a new product

Many PE-owned companies are partway through their own transformation, from on-premise licences to subscriptions, or from an older product to a newer one. In Japan, that usually means local data centres, and a sales team that can sell the new thing to customers who are comfortable with the old one.

The public record shows a lot of investment here:

  • New Relic announced its first Asia-Pacific data centre, in Tokyo, in March 2026, grew Japan headcount 20% in the year to March 2026, and is building an SAP migration team with a target of 2.5 times Japan revenue by 2030.

  • Zendesk opened a second Japan data centre in Osaka in 2024, which Zendesk says makes Japan its only country outside the US with two.

  • Qualtrics went live on AWS infrastructure in Japan in 2022.

  • SUSE's Japan team has been selling to customers moving off older Linux and VMware platforms, and in 2025 its Japan head said a Japanese megabank was close to signing for its multi-Linux support.

The profile: someone who has sold a platform change to large Japanese enterprises before, knows how long it takes, and can keep the existing customer base renewing while the new product ramps. They need credibility with the system integrators who run most of these migrations.

2. Selling a portfolio built by acquisition

Private equity owners often grow by buying. Veeam bought Securiti AI for $1.725 billion in 2025. Qualtrics bought Press Ganey Forsta for $6.75 billion, completing the deal in May 2026. Darktrace bought Cado Security and Mira Security. Anaplan bought Syrup Tech for AI forecasting. Coupa has bought Scoutbee, Cirtuo, Rossum and Tonkean.

Each acquisition lands in Japan as a new product with no Japanese-language material, no local references and no trained partners. Someone in Tokyo has to decide which of these products to push now, which to hold back, and what support they need from HQ to sell them.

The profile: a leader who can sell a broader story to the C-suite, not just one product to one department, and who is comfortable telling HQ which acquired products aren't ready for Japan yet.

3. Restructuring on the ground

Some Japan businesses need rebuilding after the deal. Two of the companies here started in Japan as joint ventures with Japan Cloud, a firm that helps foreign software companies launch locally.

  • Coupa set up Coupa K.K. as a joint venture in 2021. In May 2025, about two years after the Thoma Bravo deal closed, it appointed Koichiro Sorimachi as representative in Japan. He had previously led OpenText and CA Technologies in Japan. In 2026 Coupa widened its Japan target list from the top 300 companies to 800 and reported 151% growth on the previous year.

  • New Relic began as a Japan Cloud joint venture in 2018. Its CEO said in 2025 that the joint venture had ended. In April 2026 it appointed Masakiyo Furudate as GVP and Head of Japan. He had run Veeam's Japan business from 2017, where Veeam grew partners from about 70 to more than 200 and said in 2025 that its Japan growth was about ten times the market average.

  • Zendesk appointed Taro Mori as president in Japan in July 2025. He came from SAP and SuccessFactors Japan. Four months later the CEO said publicly that he wanted Japan back in the global top five.

The profile: an operator who has taken over a business mid-stream before. They need to assess the team quickly, keep the customers who matter, and give the owners an honest plan in their first 90 days.

4. Rebuilding the channel

In Japan, most enterprise software is bought through partners: system integrators, distributors and resellers. Changing the partner strategy is one of the fastest ways to change the size of a Japan business, and one of the riskiest.

  • Darktrace signed SB C&S as a distributor in August 2025, giving it reach into about 15,000 resellers, after adding Zuken Netwave as a reseller earlier that year.

  • Coupa signed HIPUS as a reseller in May 2026, with a target of 100 mid-market customers in three years, and launched a virtual card with SMBC Card and Visa.

  • Veeam hired Kentaro Eguro, long-time president of Arcserve Japan, to lead partner sales in 2025.

  • SUSE put its Japan focus on the partner ecosystem and four industries in 2024: manufacturing, retail, telecoms and finance.

The profile: someone who already has the relationships with the big distributors and system integrators, and who knows which partners will actually sell your product and which will just add you to a price list.

Stability is also a choice

Not every deal needs a new Japan leader. Anaplan's Japan president, Nakata-san, joined as Country Manager in 2016. He has led Anaplan Japan through the take-private, global layoffs and the IPO preparation, and Anaplan Connect Tokyo in September 2026 had speakers from SMBC, Mercari, Fujitsu, INPEX and Dai-ichi Life. Satoru Kumashiro has led Qualtrics in Japan since it opened in 2018, through the sale from SAP to Silver Lake.

Long tenure in Japan builds trust with customers and partners, and that trust doesn't transfer easily. If the incumbent fits what Japan needs next, keeping them can be the right call. The mistake is to assume they do, or to assume they don't, without checking.

What to settle before you hire

Before you start a search for a Japan leader in a PE-owned company, get clear answers to these:

  1. What has to be true in Japan by the exit? Revenue, growth rate, profitability or a reference customer list. The answer changes the profile.

  2. Which of the four situations are you in? Most companies are in two at once.

  3. What will HQ fund, and for how long? A leader who builds the first customers in a segment is a different hire from one who scales a known brand. We've written about that difference in Builder, Translator or Caretaker.

  4. Who in Japan does the board trust today? If the answer is nobody, that is the problem to solve first.

  5. Can the candidate argue with HQ in English and sell to a Japanese board in Japanese? Both are needed, and very few people do both well.

Getting this right takes longer than filling the seat. It also affects how the Japan business looks to the next buyer, or in an IPO prospectus.

If you own or advise a software company with a Japan business, we're happy to talk it through.

Sources

How this post was researched: AI read the deal announcements, company press releases in English and Japanese, Japanese technology press (Cloud Watch, ASCII, EnterpriseZine, Mynavi TECH+), Bain's Japan private equity research and our own Why Japan data, working under Murray Clarke's direction. The views on leadership and hiring are Murray's own, from more than 20 years of executive search in Tokyo. Murray Clarke is accountable for the content.

Listen to this article

Loading audio player…

Country Manager search is our focus.

Aspiring Partners

15 searches, 2026 year to date

Source
Referral 13Business development 2
Type
Succession 10Startup 5
Role
Country Manager 12Other leaders 3

As of 1 November 2026. Includes work in progress: 12 searches are closed, signed or accepted, and 3 are under way. Percentages are by number of searches and rounded.

Murray Clarke
Next

AI Transformation or AI Startup: Which Leader Fits Which Job