Fujitsu Ltd has reached an agreement with Nisho Iwai to purchase its 50% stake in Nifty Corp, the operator of the Nifty Serve online service – Japan’s largest – for the equivalent of $220.2m. Nifty is a 50-50 joint venture between the two companies. Nifty Serve is a 12 year-old service modeled after the likes of CompuServe, with 2.7 million subscribers and about 750 forums. Nisho Iwai is a trading house and has already recorded the $215.5m expected profit from the sale in its earnings forecast for the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, when the deal is expected to be complete. Nifty Corp has 373 employees and saw 1997 revenues of $365m.
