KATAOKA Takayuki; MORIKAWA Katsumi; TAKAHASHI Katsuhiko; NAKAMURA Nobuto
Journal of Japan Industrial Management Association Japan Industrial Management Association Vol.54,No.1,pp.60–70 (1) 60 - 70 1342-2618 2003
[Refereed] This paper deals with management issues and survival strategies for smaller regional wholesale businesses. In Japan, a traditional market price system has been used in the wholesale sector, and many smaller wholesalers take a cut of the profits. However, the distribution business in Japan has dramatically changed in recent years as international competition and information technology have grown rapidly. As the result, traditional management strategies are hardly any longer useful for most Japanese companies. Also, retail businesses have become very selective in choosing wholesalers under these conditions. Retailers have even begun to trade directly with manufacturers, forsaking the useful information held by the wholesalers. Therefore, a few selected firms have been distinguished as winners, and it is time for the many unselected firms to review their management strategies because it is obvious that their survival depends on how fast they are willing to conduct the review. As regional wholesalers are very important for manufacturers and retail business in Japan, they should review the business know-how and management resources that they have, and explore every possibility for new business, including business cooperation. In other words, first they must figure out their original strong points, then combine traditional Japanese business customs with the strong points possessed by global wholesalers. Some public organizations have tried to analyze the wholesale business through many kinds of questionnaires. However their traditional analysis is often limited to summarizing the numbers of answers for each question, and therefore, it is difficult to figure out the relationship among what wholesalers are dealing with and the groups of each category. It is very important to figure out the relationships and groups among them because the wholesale business structure has become complicated. In this paper, we first classify the types of operations based on answers regarding their management issues and new business strategies by introducing correspondence analysis. We then discuss the new survival strategies by considering the results of the correspondence analysis, traditional results, and also types of operations. We lastly discuss the new strategies of new businesses and coordination for smaller regional wholesale businesses.