Four Companies, One Friday: What September 18 Reveals About Tokyo’s Listing Market

Tokyo’s market will have four new corporate names attached to the same date on Friday, September 18: OHKEN, the enterprise-software company behind the long-running Daijin business-software family; akippa, an Osaka company that turns unused parking spaces into reservable inventory; Techno Craft, a Niigata technology company whose roots are in GPS navigation for golf carts; and Vertex, a Tokyo real-estate company spanning development, sales, leasing and management. JPX’s September calendar lists all four for that day. ^[1]

Yet “four IPOs” is too simple. akippa, Techno Craft and Vertex are scheduled to join the Standard Market, where ordinary investors can trade. OHKEN is taking a different route: TOKYO PRO Market, a market for specified professional investors with a different listing framework and J-Adviser system. That distinction matters more than the shared date. ^{[2] [3]}

Three Standard Market offerings — all priced at the top of their ranges

JPX lists Techno Craft’s range at ¥630–¥650 and the final price at ¥650; Vertex at ¥530–¥550 and ¥550; and akippa at ¥540–¥570 and ¥570. In other words, all three Standard Market deals were priced at the upper end of their announced ranges. That is a fact about the book-building outcome, not a promise about the first trade or any later share price. ^[1]

Using the published share counts and offer prices, Japan.co.jp calculates that the three Standard Market transactions represent about ¥5.26 billion of shares if the over-allotment portions are included. Only about ¥2.22 billion of that is primary issuance before expenses. The rest is largely secondary stock sold by existing holders. The distinction is basic but important: transaction value is not the same thing as fresh cash going into the companies.

OHKEN: four decades of back-office software — and a professional-market route

OHKEN is the oldest company in the group. Its official profile dates the business to November 1980 and the incorporated company to April 1985. It operates from Tokyo and Fukuoka, reported 380 employees as of April 2026 and lists fiscal 2025 sales of ¥7.004 billion. ^[6]

Its identity has been built around the Daijin family of core business software. The products cover accounting, payroll, human resources, attendance, sales, customer management and versions tailored to fields such as construction, medicine and social welfare. In an era in which software fashion changes quickly, OHKEN’s story is unusually long: it has spent decades working on the systems businesses cannot casually switch off. ^[7]

But code 620A is not joining the Standard Market. JPX lists OHKEN for TOKYO PRO Market, with Phillip Securities Japan as its J-Adviser. ^[3]

The history of that market reaches back to TOKYO AIM, created in June 2009 by a joint venture between the Tokyo Stock Exchange Group and the London Stock Exchange. TSE absorbed the venture in 2012 and renamed the venue TOKYO PRO Market. JPX says the market does not use the same numerical listing criteria for shareholder numbers, tradable shares or profit that apply in the ordinary public markets; listing examination is conducted through the J-Adviser framework, and investors are restricted to specified professional investors and related categories. ^[2]

akippa: turning a parking problem into digital inventory

akippa Inc. was established in February 2009. The parking marketplace itself launched in 2014. Its model converts spaces that may otherwise sit idle — unused monthly-parking bays, private driveways, vacant land and commercial-property spaces — into parking that drivers can find, reserve and pay for before arrival. ^{[8] [9]}

The company says it had 5.5 million cumulative members by the end of July 2026, excluding space owners, and more than 55,000 reservable parking listings on a monthly-average basis as of December 2025. Its scheduled listing code is 627A and its offer price is ¥570. ^{[8] [9]}

The deeper business question is not simply how many people have downloaded or registered for a service. A two-sided marketplace becomes more useful when supply is dense where demand appears — around stadiums, festivals, tourist districts, commuter destinations and neighborhoods where conventional parking is scarce. That observation is Japan.co.jp analysis of the platform model, not company guidance.

akippa also reflects a larger change in how Japanese cities monetize temporary access. A parking space once had to be discovered physically. A marketplace can give that same patch of concrete a price, a schedule, a map location and a reservation. The product is not the land itself; it is the ability to match an empty interval with a driver who values certainty.

Techno Craft: a Niigata GPS company that kept finding new uses for location

Techno Craft’s history begins in 1995 with a GPS-based golf-cart operation-management system. Its corporate history says the first Marshal Navi system was delivered to a golf course in Tochigi that year. In 2004, the company applied experience from golf-course positioning to Commu Navi, a management system for kindergartens, nursery schools and certified childcare centers. ^{[10] [11]}

Today the company describes three principal fields: golf, childcare ICT and health monitoring. Its website says its cart-navigation systems are installed at more than 1,300 golf courses nationwide. More recent products use wearable devices and cloud dashboards to monitor location and health information for workers and other users. ^[11]

Techno Craft is scheduled to list as 622A at ¥650. JPX lists 426,000 newly issued shares, 1,500,600 secondary shares and an over-allotment of up to 288,900 shares. ^[1]

That arc — from a highly specific golf-course operating problem to childcare administration and worker monitoring — is a reminder that “technology company” can describe something more prosaic than a consumer app. Techno Craft’s products are built around environments where location, safety and operational data have to work together.

Vertex: real estate from development and sales to recurring management

Vertex was established in December 2010. Its official company information lists real-estate consulting, planning and development, sales and leasing brokerage, rental management, investment operations and a real-estate fund business. President Yuji Kajio’s official profile says he previously worked in sales for a mid-sized developer before founding the company. ^{[12] [13]}

The listing code is 623A and the offer price ¥550. With 3.15 million primary shares, Vertex has by far the largest new-share issuance of the three Standard Market deals. At the offer price, that primary issuance represents roughly ¥1.73 billion before issue expenses.

That matters because an IPO can serve several purposes at once. It can bring new capital into a business, create a market for existing shareholders, raise public visibility and impose a more demanding disclosure framework. The balance among those purposes is different for each of Friday’s companies.

The Standard Market itself is a recent invention

For international readers, “Standard” may sound like a long-established middle tier of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It is not. TSE reorganized its cash-equity market into Prime, Standard and Growth on April 4, 2022. JPX describes Standard as a market for companies with a certain level of liquidity as public investments, basic governance standards and a commitment to sustainable growth and medium- to long-term corporate value. ^[4]

That relatively new label now accommodates businesses with very different histories: a digital parking marketplace, a regional technology manufacturer-software hybrid and a real-estate group. Their shared market does not make their economics comparable. It means each has chosen, and been approved for, the same public-market framework.

Why all four codes end in “A”

There is another small piece of market history hiding in the four identifiers: 620A, 622A, 623A and 627A. The “A” is not a quality grade. Japan’s Securities Identification Code Committee began incorporating letters into newly assigned securities codes from January 2024 because the supply of four-digit numeric codes was shrinking. Existing older codes were not changed. ^[5]

So Friday’s codes are artifacts of market plumbing rather than investment labels. They tell us these identifiers were assigned in the alphanumeric era of Japan’s securities infrastructure.

What is worth watching on September 18

Listing-day coverage naturally gravitates toward the first price. It is visible, immediate and easy to compare with an offer price. But a first trade is a measure of supply and demand at one moment, not a complete assessment of a business.

For the three Standard Market companies, the more durable questions concern liquidity, the use of newly raised capital and whether each business can convert its existing operating strengths into public-company growth. For OHKEN, a different question applies: how a mature enterprise-software company uses TOKYO PRO Market and how its disclosure and capital strategy develop within that professional-investor framework.

That is what makes September 18 more interesting than a simple list of tickers. A 1980-born business-software company, a 2009 startup that eventually found its defining product in parking, a Niigata GPS specialist and a 2010 real-estate company arrive at the exchange on the same date — but through different doors, with different capital structures and very different ideas about what growth looks like.