Japan Post to sell its resort hotels to Orix Real Estate
Japan Post invited bids and selected Orix over around 30 other bidders by giving top priority to job security for the employees.
Japan Post plans to sell 70 of its resort hotels to the leasing company Orix Real Estate Corp., the Orix subsidiary, for an amount of JPY 10,886 million (€88,512), the Japanese news agency Jiji Press reported.
Japan Post is required under law to sell or close its “Kampo no Yado” or “Kampo Inn” hotels by September 2012, five years after the start of the privatisation process that started in October last year.
Kampo Inns were built for policyholders of ”kampo” postal life insurance before the privatisation of Japan’s postal system. Japan Post said, it will spin off the hotel business to a company that it will set up on April 1 and sell the new firm to Orix. Orix plans to develop the network of inns as the core of its hotel business. It will take over the entire workforce of around 3,200 employees including 640 full-time staff and 2,600 non-regular workers, and nine company apartments for them.
In fiscal 2007 ended in March, the nine inns across Japan had a total of 2.08 million guests and enjoyed an average room occupancy rate of more than 70%. But the business lost about JPY 4 billion (€32.52 million) in the year due to a lack of cost consciousness among managers and workers.
