On February 21 Air Water made an investment in Morita Holdings, which is a major domestic manufacturer of fire trucks and fire protection equipment, forming a business and capital alliance to engage in mutual develop and sales of firefighting related equipment. Third party allotment will be implemented with Air Water as the third party. Air Water will treat its 1.73 million Morita shares as its own. The amount of capital raised amounted to about 1.4 billion, with the ratio of investment in Morita coming to 69%. With the exception of a group involving employee owned shares, the major Morita shareholders are financial institutions. Air Water will become the major shareholder not as a financial institution but as a company engaged in business.

Morita Holdings has under its wing the Morita which handles ladder trucks and fire pumps as well as Miyata Industry which manufactures extinguishers. There are other general purpose companies which handle fire extinguishing equipment, and environmental related vehicles such as garbage trucks. Sales of the group totaled 67.1 billion yen, with ordinary profit amounting to 6.4 billion yen as of March, 2013. The company boasts the top share in Japan for ladder trucks and other firefighting vehicles.

In September of last year Morita acquired Air Water shares and had already formed a business relationship with it. The speculations of the Morita group, which is aiming at further expansion of its fire extinguishers business, and Air Water, which is aiming at development of new business related to firefighting and fire retardants, were found to be in unison. Sometime in the autumn of last year they started to deliberate and the discussions resulted in the present alliance. A spokesperson from the Morita Corporate Planning Department commented that as a result of the current alliance, “Using the hospital equipment sales channel which Air Water has, we anticipate an expansion of sales of our firefighting facilities used in hospitals such as sprinklers.”