Earlier this month Moria Mountain Holding GK purchased the Moiwa ski resort. Powderlife Magazine caught up with the fund representative Mr. Eyal Agmoni to find out a bit more about their company and their plans for the future of Moiwa.
Tell me a about Moria mountain holding GK?
Moria mountain holding is a Japanese company based in Tokyo created solely for the purpose of holding the Moiwa ski resort. It is part of a group of companies owned by a private equity fund. I am the representative in Japan for the fund.
Is this the first ski resort your company has taken on?
Absolutely.
What are you planning as your target market for the resort?
Moiwa being the most traditionally famous resort as it is the oldest place in the region we would really like to target a lot of Japanese. At the same time we would also like to see more foreigners come to this very cozy and nice part of the mountain, which right now is untapped because of many difficulties with the previous owners. We would like to be more integrated into the mountain and the other operators to try and get more people exposed to this side of the mountain.
What differences will we see in Moiwa this season?
This season won’t see great changes. We just took over the resort in the first week of December. Our first mission was to make sure the lifts opened on time for the season, but there are many ideas that people are talking to us about that we are looking forward to. In General we wish Moiwa to be the natural choice for kids and families as well as beginner skiers to choose, we will work towards that goal but with room to allow more advance skiers to enjoy our slops.
The Moiwa towers were not part of you purchase. How do you think the towers and Kanronomori will play into future of the resort?
Kanronomori is a vital part of the future. From our understanding there has some bad air with the previous players. We want to bring them in and we would like to hopefully connect. Regarding the towers we are not sure, they are still in the bankruptcy court so there are some issues there. However, we definitely would like to develop the existing facilities which of course include everything that is already there.
What are some of your long term goals for the resort?
We are very lucky to have Riccardo Tossani of Riccardo Tossani Architecture to develop a masterplan for us. One of the key points is that Moiwa is very attractive in the summer which is why Kanronomori is full all of the time; it has both seasons attraction, so the idea is to develop here a high class, top notch resort with maybe a famous operator who will help us to maintain it. The idea is definitely to grow the whole area to a world class resort.
I understand that you will be trying to link Moiwa with the Niseko United. What steps have already been taken to make this happen?
Right now we are doing what is called an Isatsu visit, just exchanging name cards. We know that there have been attempts in the past for previous owners to connect; we hope that this time we will be lucky enough to join the pack. We met with Niseko town council today and clearly stated that we want to see Niseko growing. We hope that with their help and others; there have been many good people here to help us put everything together. We hope we will be able to achieve our goal which is to connect with the Niseko united, or/and other resorts.