Selling into Japan
Why Japan takes
three to four years
The figure is not folklore, and it is not pessimism.
It is the cost of a decision process that is designed to spread risk.
Selling into Japan
The figure is not folklore, and it is not pessimism.
It is the cost of a decision process that is designed to spread risk.
Anyone who has looked seriously at Japan has heard the number. Plan on three to four years before the market carries itself. It comes up in almost every first conversation I have with an overseas company, and it came up again, unprompted and in almost the same words, when I spoke with the operations manager of the Ireland Japan Chamber of Commerce: the difficulty is not the product, it is that trust takes time to build, and you should expect to be in the red for the first few years.
The number is reliable. What is missing from it is the breakdown. Nobody tells you which part of those years is genuinely necessary and which part you are paying for because you did not know any better. That distinction is the whole of the practical question, and it is invisible from outside the country.
A proposal typically passes from the person you are talking to, to their section head, to their department head, to a director. An overseas company that arrives expecting "if the proposal is good it gets approved" pays for every one of those layers in calendar time.
This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. The layers exist so that no single person carries the consequences alone — which is also why they cannot be bypassed by being more persuasive.
In a Japanese evaluation, "where else is this being used" carries as much weight as specification or price, and often more. The reason is personal: the employee who sponsored an unproven supplier is the one asked to explain it if the project fails.
So your first Japanese customer is heavier than your first customer in any other market, and every subsequent one is lighter.
In most markets, relationship and contract advance together. In Japan the relationship goes first and the contract is placed on top of it afterwards. The sense that this company will behave properly when something goes wrong arrives before the drafting does.
Three to four years is the figure for doing nothing in particular.
It is not a fixed cost.
Japan is slow to enter because its decision-making is internally consistent: spread the risk, weight the precedent, build the relationship before the contract. You cannot change that design, and attempts to argue with it read as inexperience.
What you can do is choose where to spend. Most of the three-to-four-year figure sits in two places — reaching the person who actually decides, and producing the first reference. Both are addressable from month one. Companies that treat the period as something to wait out generally spend the full four years. Companies that treat it as a work list generally do not.
The second point worth planning around is the asymmetry. The entry is the narrowest you will encounter; the position afterwards is unusually durable, because the next supplier faces the same wall you did. That is the return the first years are buying, and it is worth knowing that before you decide the budget.
If you are trying to work out where your own three years are going
Tell me the market segment, who you have spoken to so far, and what the last reply said. I will tell you which of the three structures you are sitting in, and what would actually move it.