^ abcde平成24年3月期 決算短信〔日本基準〕(連結) [Financial Results for Fiscal Year ended March 31, 2012] (PDF) (in Japanese). Nankai Electric Railway Co., Ltd. April 27, 2012. Archived from the original(PDF) on November 3, 2012. Retrieved May 11, 2012.
Nankai Electric Railway Co., Ltd. (南海電気鉄道株式会社, Nankai denki tetsudō kabushiki gaisha) is a private railway in Japan, founded in 1884. The name Nankai (which means "South Sea") comes from the company's routes along the Nankaidō, the old highway that ran south from the old capital, Kyoto, along the sea coast. Nankai predates all the electric railways in the Tokyo region.
The Nankai Railway Company was founded on June 16, 1884. In 1944 it was one of the companies that merged to form Kinki Nippon Railway Co., Ltd. (Kin-nichi, present Kintetsu Railway). However, Kin-nichi transferred the former Nankai Railway Company's lines to the present Nankai Electric Railway Co., Ltd. (named Koyasan Electric Railway Co., Ltd. from March 28, 1925 until March 14, 1947) on June 1, 1947.
From 1938 to 1988, Nankai Electric Railway owned the Nankai Hawks, a team in Nippon Professional Baseball that was based in Osaka. The team was sold to Daiei after the 1988 season and moved to Fukuoka and rechristened the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks. The team was sold again in 2005 to SoftBank, and are now the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks.
‡ indicates rapid transit operators § indicates semi-major rail operators *Not a member of Associations of Private Japanese Railways, therefore excluded under the formal Japanese definition, although its comparable size is undisputed