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We've spun the wheel for the Developed Asia-Pacific bucket. The ticker has landed in Tokyo, on a company with a backstory more dramatic than anything we've covered.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Founded in 1960 in Tokyo, Japan. Listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2014.

In 1988, a Tokyo magazine company brought down the Prime Minister of Japan, his entire cabinet, a former Prime Minister, and leaders from every major political party. One of the largest political corruption scandals of postwar Japan. The company at the centre of it was Recruit.

You wouldn't expect that company to still exist. Let alone to be the fourth most valuable company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

It also owns Indeed, the website where you probably last applied for a job and the world’s largest job site.

A few key facts:

We'll come back to that thirty-one-hires-a-minute figure.

Recruit was founded in 1960 by a 24-year-old University of Tokyo student, Hiromasa Ezoe. The idea was small: place job ads in university newspapers. Three years later he launched a free magazine called "Job Journal." Companies paid to be in it. Students read it for free. It was Indeed, in print, six decades before Indeed existed.

The model worked so well that by the 1980s Recruit had spread into housing, weddings, restaurants, beauty salons, travel. All the same idea. Free for the consumer, paid for by the business.

Then came the scandal. In 1986, Ezoe quietly offered pre-listing shares of a Recruit subsidiary to 76 of Japan's most powerful people: politicians, bureaucrats, media executives. When the subsidiary went public, the shares soared. Average profit per recipient: ¥66 million.

When the story broke in 1988, Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita was forced to resign with his entire cabinet. Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone was implicated. So were leaders of the opposition. Ezoe was eventually convicted of bribery.

Most companies don't survive that. Recruit nearly didn't. The 1990s were a painful rebuild. Ezoe died in 2013, one year before the company he founded finally listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, 54 years after the first magazine.

In 2012, two years before its own IPO, Recruit made the deal that changed it from a Japanese company into a global one.

It bought a small American job site called Indeed for around $1 billion. At the time, Indeed had perhaps $100 million in annual revenue. Today, Indeed alone generates close to $10 billion. One of the best technology acquisitions of the last two decades.

Six years later, Recruit added Glassdoor for $1.2 billion. The employer reviews site you check after the interview, to find out what people who used to work there actually thought.

Together, Indeed and Glassdoor are the global front door to job searching. About 350 million people visit them every month, 665 million have created accounts, and every minute of every day in 2025, on average 31 people got hired through one of them. A platform owned in Tokyo.

Three businesses, all variations on Ezoe's 1960 idea: connect people who want something with people who offer it, and take a small fee from the side that pays.

HR Technology. Indeed and Glassdoor. ¥1.5 trillion in revenue, profit margin of 38%. About 40% of group revenue, but roughly 70% of group profit because the margins are so high. When people talk about Recruit Holdings, they are mostly talking about this.

Marketing Matching Technologies. The Japanese consumer platforms. ¥565 billion in revenue, profit margin of 27%. SUUMO is the leading property site in Japan, Hot Pepper Beauty the leading salon booking platform, Jalan does domestic travel, Zexy does weddings, Hot Pepper Gourmet does restaurants. If you live in Japan, you have almost certainly used one of these in the last month.

Staffing. ¥1.7 trillion in revenue, profit margin of only 6%. Providing temporary workers to companies. Largest segment by revenue, smallest by profit. Recruit has been pruning it.

In practice, Recruit is an Indeed company with two other businesses attached.

The most striking slide in Recruit's investor materials compares the cost of finding a hire through different channels, as a percentage of the new employee's salary.

A retained executive search firm charges up to 40% of the first year's salary. A direct hire recruiter charges 20 to 25%. Indeed, with its pay-per-click model, charges on average less than 1%.

That is the disruption story in one number. Indeed is not slightly cheaper than the alternatives. It is, on average, more than 20 times cheaper. The traditional recruitment industry is a $190 billion-a-year global market, and Indeed is steadily eating it from the bottom up.

Why doesn't a competitor do the same? Network effects: more job postings attract more job seekers, more job seekers attract more employers. Indeed got ahead long ago and never gave it back. And data: decades of records on who gets hired for what jobs. Whoever has the best matches wins.

This is what is driving the share price right now, and it cuts both ways.

The risk is real. If an AI chatbot can write your CV, find you the right job, and submit applications on your behalf, why do you need a job board? ChatGPT and similar tools threaten to become the new front door, with Indeed reduced to plumbing.

So far the reality is the opposite. In March 2026, Indeed's monthly active users hit a record high, up 18% on the year before. CEO Hisayuki Idekoba has chosen embrace over resistance. Indeed is one of OpenAI's largest customers, and in February 2026 launched an Indeed app inside ChatGPT itself. The bet is that being inside the AI gateway, with the deepest data on jobs and candidates, is more defensible than fighting it.

Not yet proven. But for now, what was supposed to threaten Indeed seems to be accelerating it.

FY2025 (fiscal year ending March 2026) was a record across the board. Revenue up 4%. Operating profit up 28%. Net profit up 22%. Return on equity of 31%, unusually high for a Japanese company of this size.

Cash generation is enormous. The company produced ¥669 billion from operations and is giving most of it back through an ongoing ¥350 billion (~$2.3 billion) share buyback. Over the past two years, Recruit has retired about 15% of all its shares.

The stock has compounded at roughly 10% per year since the 2014 IPO. ¥10,000 invested at listing would be worth around ¥32,000 today. Almost exactly what you would have got from a passive position in the global index over the same period. A good reminder of how high the bar is. 

Not a cheap stock at over 20 times forward earnings, which assumes the AI story keeps going its way.

Two open questions. The first is whether AI ends up friend or foe. So far the evidence is good, but the world where you ask a chatbot for a job and it just goes and gets you one is not far away. The second is geography. Half of Indeed's revenue comes from the US, where the labour market has been soft for two years. If American hiring picks up, Indeed picks up with it.

A Japanese magazine company started by a 24-year-old in 1960, almost destroyed by a political scandal in 1988, and rebuilt into the company that, in 2025, on average helped 31 people find a job every minute of every day.

Recruit Holdings is in every global and Asian index fund and we are happy to own it.

Data and images sourced from Recruit Holdings FY2025 Consolidated Financial Results and Recruit Holdings FY2025 Q4 Results Presentation. Share price and market cap as of late May 2026.

Next week, we'll be looking at a company from Emerging Markets.