Spin-off

　Since route bus companies are acting as commercial company, they work to increase the number of operation routes to spread management scale and gain more profit. However, as the company grows in size, its problem is “keeping balance” instead of “scale expansion”. For example, if there is a railway department and a bus department at a big railway company, the bus division may be separated from the parent company and become independent. Because railway operations are more profitable than railroad bus operations, it is possible to improve management efficiency by separating them.

Spin off within a bus company

There are many bus companies in Japan and some of their business scale are large. For example, there is Seibu-Bus-Group which bases in Fukuoka prefecture. This company boasts very large business scale. For example, it has more than 3000 buses in total.

As the scale of management grows, the number of sales offices will increase. Then a large difference in actual results is generated for each business office, so it is not easy to manage the number of trucks and change the fare according to demand. Therefore, as a bus company, in order to be able to actively adjust operation frequency and fare change, bus companies often divide the company by region, and often operate independently.

Merit

• By reducing the size of the company, it will be easy to change the mode of operation according to demand.
• Can reduce personnel expenses because they can create their own working conditions and personnel system for each area.
• It will be possible to take more flexible countermeasures against the situation that it is linked to the reduction of passengers due to the popularization of private cars and the decrease of population and the lack of money because better correspondence can be made for each area.

Demerit

• Due to the large number of users and the usage situation by region, the gap between company spin-off companies, salary, work environment and the like is inevitable.
• If spin-off is done in areas with few customers or poor usage conditions, it is difficult to stably secure passengers, that is, financial resources, so that better transportation and profit as mentioned in the above "Merit" is difficult to make improvements.
• In addition, the salary and working environment of crew and staff working in that area may deteriorate.