The Whimsical Investor

March 28, 2025

Not investment advice, I may have investments in any and all companies discussed, image copyright belongs to respective owners, all numbers are wildly inaccurate. Not many companies around today are both small and publicly traded, as the proportion of private enterprises continues to rise. Not many, indeed, are still brave enough to sail the rough seas of public scrutiny with their tiny little legal vessel, and have managed not to capsize despite everyone on board wishing they had jumped ship before that fateful IPO day. Here, I want to celebrate those businesses, by chronicling the quirkier ones in an internet-friendly list. To find, ultimately, the very silliest of them all.

• Schwälbchen Molkerei Jakob Berz AG

  This little critter, a dairy factory in Hessia, Germany, comes in at a creamy $73M market cap. The name translates to "the small swallow bird", which is a pun on the name of the little town they operate from, Bad Schwalbach. Just compare the logo with the town's crest and tell me you're not in love. Look, they are talking to each other!

  The company was founded in 1938 and has since grown to 225M€ in annual revenue, of which 8M€ is profit. The puzzle of why this business is only 78% family-owned and not 100%, might be explained with the fact that a second factory was opened in the year they went public.

  Their product lineup of course includes milk, cream, curd and yogurt, which add to around 2/3 of sales volume, but they also have random stuff like an in-house ayran brand. That one ships with a Turkish-German pamphlet for retailers, which can be quoted as saying "an ayran is only ever as good as its yogurt". Well said folks, well said. That is how you know you are dealing with a pro.
  

  Another curiosity in the 2023 annual report is their newly introduced spread, from a kind of Hessian cheese that should definitely not be used in a spread. I used to eat that cheese growing up and therefore can confirm it deserves its place as one of the worst rated cheeses worldwide. They are going for the local market with this one.

  The operations of the encompassing company are not limited to dairy production, with another big arm being a wholesale logistics division, shipping all things culinary to hotels. Since dairy has famously complex logistics, it makes sense they have process power in food distribution. A total cutie of a company!

• Nippon Ichi Software Inc.

  Founded in 1991, this game publisher is making the bold claim of being number one in Japan in its very name, defying the $27M (ca. ¥4B) valuation descending gently upon the book value. With annual revenue of ¥5B you would think they as a software firm are doing better than that, but earnings hover around ¥500M.

  Their adorable company mascot Prinny the Penguin makes up for all of it though, with a stoic stare that tells you he's seen worse than the price-to-sales ratio. He even stars in his own game! (The tagline: "Is it really alright if I'm the protagonist?")

  As an investor, I really feel appreciated and cared for when reading their annual reports, since they come with beautifully bombastic designs that almost make you forget your unrealized losses.
  That tracks, because according to their 2024 survey 53% of shareholders got to know the company through the games, and 30% bought because of them.

  Looking over the game lineup, it seems the strategy is driven by the in-house Disgaea franchise, followed by a shotgun publishing approach reaching all the way down to 10 download mobile apps that are for sure in the red. Maybe I should give them a call, developing those is my speciality. Since they are a pretty storied company by now, they are also trying to bank on retro titles like Jigsaw World (1995), adding yet more charm to the portfolio.

  They did 30 years, they can do another 30. Come on folks, I believe you can turn it around!

• Bergbahnen Engelberg-Trübsee-Titlis AG

  Our next ticker hoists us out of the dip into the soaring heights of the Swiss alps. As the name suggests, this company got started with mountain cable cars, back in 1911, and has since climbed up to a $160M market cap. With 70M Francs annual revenue and 15M earnings, this is a rock solid business. This photo from 1910 conveys well what kind of tourism asset they are sitting on, as they serve 1.1M guests per year.

  

  Their cornered resource didn't make them lazy though. In 1992, they set up the world's first gondola which rotates around its vertical axis, and the company is still building, with a new cable car coming up online right about the time of writing, as the 23/24 annual report suggests.

  They seem to understand value creation very well, by on the one hand operating i.e. a free bus service for both passengers and inhabitants of the neighboring town Engelberg, and on the other hand capturing the tourist value with an in-house restaurant and hotel business. The town administration of Engelberg holds 3.5% of the shares, which sounds like a good incentive structure.

  Something tells me this 100-year-old business in a 900-year-old town isn't going away soon, even as its main resource, snowfall, is being threatened by climate change.

• Fujiya Co. Ltd.

  The iconic candy maker Fujiya is yet older, by one year. With a $410M market cap, you hope to get a piece of the ¥109B (ca. $720M) annual revenue, but then get to know that earnings are about ¥3B. Why, you ask?

  I can assure you that cash is well spent. Most importantly, of course, on Peko-chan! Peko-chan is the universally beloved mascot of the company, and can be seen around all Japan in the form of costumed actors, on the Peko-chan childrens' tour van, on an unreal selection of merchandise, such as this ¥88,000 statuette of Peko-chan as the legendary princess Kaguya, in special Peko-chan-themed store locations called "Peko's Kitchen", in her own mobile game, in her own museum in Ginza, and in all URLs of the company website: www.fujiya-peko.co.jp. She even collaborates with cartoon stars. Plural! Let's single out Anpanman, which she operates a grand total of 4 (four) themed store locations. Having been a guest at the Anpanman museum, where the Sendai store location is housed, I would have to affirm — this is a trip. Why do I want to buy this so bad? I don't even like sweets...

  Which leads us to the next part of the Fujiya business, restaurants. Out of a total of 780 total locations across Japan, most of which seem to be franchisee cake shops, they run a chain of 27 family restaurants (famiresu), plus two high end places in Osaka and Tokyo. Restaurants make up only 5% of revenue and maybe do not fit so well in with their brand, so let's move on to their strength, the sweets themselves.

  The origin of the company is very innovative. They claim to have sold the first christmas cake, way back in their founding year, which has started a surprisingly large market. The average customer today pays ¥4,500 for one of these cakes, and they have become very popular over the years.
  The classic Fujiya product is a shortcake, which summarized in the category "western sweets" (Yōka) makes up 22% of revenue, alongside things like Baumkuchen. The bulk of sales, 55%, comes from everyday sweets, like the classic Milky bonbons. Out of the popular sweets, they will usually break out a special local version, such as adding apples in Aomori, strawberries in Tochigi, or, the best of all of course, Zunda in Tōhoku. A more recent addition are the "smeared full of chocolate"-cookies (Choko Mamire) which are branded with a little choc guy bathing in more choc. And it's not just the looks, these taste really good. Let's also not forget the recently introduced Zā Wārudo version, where the little guy travels around the world, wears a little French hat etc.

  Never change, Fujiya. Never change.

• Soft-World International

  Headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, this $510M market cap video game business is big for a leader in the quirkiness sector. They collect 5.3B New Taiwan Dollars (≈$190M) in annual revenue, of which around 1B fall out as earnings.

  The company structure is characterized by a colorful potpourri of specialized subsidiaries, from the game art studios to multiple payment processing companies, to game publishers, to holdings and copyright, to wholesale. Weirder still, these subsidiaries are nested. Soft-world owns 49% percent of its spinout Chinese Gamer International, which in turn owns 100% of Taichigamer, which owns 100% of Transasiagamer, which owns 100% of Yulon Online, etc. These make up a negligible fraction of the profit though, with the main company accounting for more than 80%, but interestingly the revenue is 50%-50% between main company and subsidiaries.

  All of that may sound crazy, and perhaps it is, but there is a strategy behind it: Vertical integration. Let's take GameFlier, a spinout that is responsible for game operations, and I assume was founded specifically to host the Taiwanese servers for the beloved MMO classic Ragnarok Online.
  A similar case is Game First, 2005 spinout that handles localization for the Taiwanese market. It seems to have specifically created to service Blizzard's World of Warcraft, and stayed around to deliver Cantonese versions of Diablo III, Overwatch and more. The pattern is clear. They build capabilities with external deals, and keep the capacity to build the Soft-World ecosystem.

  To illustrate, we might be play one of their many, many MMO titles, like the 2006 high-fantasy title WuLin Online (which is still updated frequently, wow!) and pay our virtual goods with MyCard, their platform for customer loyalty and game payments, which is also open to the most random 3rd parties you could imagine.

  The spinouts also explain the Nasdaq listing in 2004, as the founder Wang Chin-Po explains in an interview with the Taipei Times.

  
  This is Spaceship Captain Katherine from Goddess Online, voiced by Mariko Suzuki. Having been around since 1983, they have a amassed a big pile of products and games spanning most of gaming history. And the funny thing is, despite the volume, none of their 1st party products feel cheap or spammy in any way, rather more like heartful indie works.
  My favorite time capsule in the lineup is the 2013 moe-meets-sci-fi-meets-fantasy RPG Goddess Online | Lightspeed Edition. Long story short, you're a hero chosen by the goddesses to get rid of aliens from the future, and you pay for it with MyCard.
  The screenshots of Taiwanese Windows XP with install instructions, the impeccable anime illustrations, the voice lines in Japanese, the links to Facebook, the login safety system that works via your phone, the terms of service giving you a 7 days ban if you use an exploit — I miss this stuff.

  Soft-World has made their name a reality. They are a whole world of games software, a tiny microcosm trying furiously to project the entire video game value chain into its 245-headcount self. A worthy endeavor — applause! We have found a winner: I am happy to announce that Soft-World International wins this years' Silliest Public Company Award. What a beautiful business. Except of course if that subsidiary structure is up to no good after all, in which case I take it back.

With the coveted award handed out, we can move on to a more serious point. Fewer publicly traded companies could eventually mean a real problem; we could get locked out of both access to both returns and to information, the precondition to opening up a discussion like the above. Let us keep the balance of private and public, and cherish the annual reports that still keep us company in trying times.