• Home
• About/Contact
• Economic Reports
• Research
• Advertising

• Business
• Economics
• Reports
• Finance
• Marketing
• Politics
• Real Estate
• Services
• Retail
• Tech

Subscribe

Retail Roundup: Seiyu announces more changes to come

Let’s start by looking at Seiyu, a firm that has been much discussed on this website over the past year or so. According to the Nikkei, Seiyu intends to renovate about 90 of its locations over the coming two years, at a cost of over 30 billion yen.

Seiyu lost about 20 billion yen in fiscal 2007 and has been in the red for six straight years. The Nikkei tells us that Seiyu intends to sell more Wal-Mart brand casual clothing at its shops, despite the fact that clothing sales at supermarkets continues to fall - they were down 8.6% in May alone. Seiyu also intends to link up further with Wal-Mart in terms of sourcing products from China. Although this might make economic sense, it also bucks the trend of consumer mistrust of goods produced in China.

Finally, we see that Seiyu intends to carry an “expanded lineup” of flat-panel TVs. Again, supermarkets are generally selling less of this kind of stuff, and it’s hard to imagine Seiyu outpricing, let alone out-marketing the Yodabashi, Bic Cameras and Kojima Denki shops in this area.

Finally, sales per square meter continue to decline at Japan’s supermarkets. Yet again, Seiyu intends to focus its renovation efforts on its larger locations, with 6,000 to 10,000 square meters of shop space.

New Tokyo Tower to be called Tokyo Sky Tree

Yes, it’s official: The 610 meter world’s tallest tower¹ will officially be called Tokyo Sky Tree.

As a friend pointed out this weekend: “They let the fans name the Nashville Predators and the Atlanta Thrashers.”

¹The debate is open on that, so fire away.

DoCoMo has a new logo; increased market share to follow?

We’ve touched before on the struggles facing DoCoMo, Japan’s mobile market leader. As the introduction of number portability and aggressive advertising and pricing campaigns from rivals AU and Softbank have driven DoCoMo’s market share under 50% for the first time since late 1998, the firm is at a crossroads. It has attempted to reassert itself as an innovator by launching a line of phones that emit scents, and is pushing the same kind of family discount packages on its website that Softbank has leveraged into market share expansion over the past year. Read more

FSA to keep an eye on Shinginko Tokyo, should it survive

Just in case you might have been considering applying for a loan at the cash machine otherwise known as Shinginko Tokyo, it has been announced that the Financial Services Agency intends to keep a “closer eye” on the bank’s lending activities, according to the Nikkei.

Shinginko Tokyo, which apparently loaned money to some 2,300 firms that went bust between April 2005 and January 2008, now lists 28.5 billion yen of its initial 100 billion yen of capitalization as unrecoverable. The bank is also running a deficit of 93.6 billion yen.

The Nikkei quotes Yoshinori Shimizu, a professor at Hitotsubashi University, as saying:

Financial authorities should probably have inspected or urged (ShinGinko Tokyo) to improve its business model before the bank’s financial strength was weakened this much.

That would have been a good idea (but then again, it’s just taxpayer money, right?) The bank is seeking an additional 40 billion yen capital injection from the city of Tokyo, which is somehow actually being considered - as are criminal charges against former members of the bank’s management. With the FSA watching, Shinginko Tokyo may no longer be synonymous with pure robbery, but the good times might not be over just yet - head down to Otemachi to hand in your application for a loan.

At Shinginko Tokyo’s opening ceremony in March 2005 (pictured), Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro said, “This bank is absolutely essential in order to tap into Tokyo’s potential. I hope the entire Tokyo metropolis will get behind it.”

Potential what? Perhaps the governor meant that the citizens of Tokyo would be getting under the bank.

Blogosphere: Mixi’s new Terms of Use to allow it to sell crowdsourced content?

Mixi, Japan’s largest social networking site, has announced a new Terms of Use that is set to take effect on April 1 of this year, the effects of which could seemingly have serious implications for the website’s users.

Although the terms of use cannot be seen without logging in to Mixi’s site, the changes have been reported over at Slashdot’s Japan site. Blogger Fukumimi proves a good translation:

By agreeing to the ToU (which all users implicitly do by continuing to using the service):

1. Users grant Mixi a no-royalty, non-exclusive rights (of replication, broadcasting, public transmission, display, distribution, translation, alteration, etc) to any content uploaded onto Mixi servers.

2. Users agree not to assert their moral rights against Mixi. [Moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. source:Wikipedia]

When the new ToU comes into effect, the terms will apply retroactively to content uploaded before the changes to the ToU.

What does this all mean? Essentially, Mixi will be able to use any content on its site - potentially even private messages between users - for any purpose it sees fit, including profit-making ventures.

If Mixi’s plan is to monetize its crowdsourced content, trouble could easily be seen on the horizon. As Matt at AltJapan points out, more than a few famous people currently write on Mixi. Would the firm dare to incite a potential legal challenge by attempting to profit from their work? Read more

Japan supermarket sales down 1.7% in January, falling for 25th straight month

During the brief history of this website, we have yet been able to report a rise in Japan’s supermarket sales. At some point we are sure it will come along, but it did not happen in January, according to data released yesterday by the Japan Chain Stores Association.

The figures show a 1.7% decline compared to the January 2007. Not only have sales now fallen for 25 straight months, but they have fallen in 46 of the past 47 months. The JCSA data is based on sales at 8,653 shops owned by 78 companies that have been in operation for at least one year.

The truly frightening figure is that when sales at newly opened stores are included, they fell by a stunning 5.6 percent. Usually the inclusion of these stores makes the numbers look a little bit better. In December, sales had been down 1.5% including such shops, and 1.8% when they were filtered out.

Here’s a breakdown by category for January sales:

• Food: -0.3%, 59.4% of total revenue
• Household Products: -3.6%, 20.6% of total revenue
• Clothing: -4.2%, 13.8% of total revenue
• Miscellaneous Items: -1.4%, 5.9% of total revenue
• Services: -11.3%, 0.3% of total revenue

Food sales had risen slightly in December, while all other categories were down.

We also see some interesting figures in terms of employment. In January, There were a total of 441,651 employees on payroll at the nation’s supermarkets, down from 467,866 in December. This is a 5.6% decline in workforce. The number of full-time workers fell from 134,335 in December to 128,737 in January, while the number of part-timers fell from 333,531 in December to 312,914 last month.

The JCSA points out that the scandal over frozen Chinese gyoza broke in late January, and that according to the Ministry of Heath, Labour and Welfare that the average monthly wage had fallen to 330,212 yen in 2007.

We have not yet seen household spending data for January in order to compare it to supermarket spending, though since those numbers are due out within the next week, it will be interesting to see how households spent on food in January.

Central Tokyo office rents up 13.36% over a year ago

Late last week, real estate consulting firm Miki Shoji released their quarterly Tokyo Office Building Market Research Report for January 2008. The report covers the five central wards of Tokyo (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Minato, Chiyoda and Chuo Wards). It surveys 2,619 office buildings (35 new and 2,584 pre-existing) that have at least 330 square meters of office space for rent on each floor. New buildings are defined as having their office space come online after January 1, 2007.

The first thing we notice is that the number of “new” buildings has increased by ten since the last report was issued in October. With rent at new buildings being exceedingly higher than that of older buildings, the addition of ten new buildings pulls the increase in average rent noticeably above the increase in rent at existing buildings. Read more

Google, YouTube to team up with Matsushita to deliver internet-enabled flat screen televisions

Tuesday morning’s Nikkei is set to publish a story that Google and Matsushita have agreed to join forces and develop internet-enabled flat panel televisions that will allow watchers to access Google’s YouTube and Picasa <sarcasm>whatever that is</sarcasm> services with the touch of a remote control button…

…but only in the US, for now.

Baby steps. We’re still taking baby steps.

Who’s going to bring Apple’s iPhone to Japan?

Apple has said that they would like to make the iPhone available in Asia sometime in 2008, and we’ve already speculated quite a bit on what form the iPhone could take in Japan. There have been a few developments, however, that make this story worth watching.

First, this past week we found out that spending on mobile phones in the US is at an all-time high, and it appears to be driven by iPhone-related revenue. We also see a report stating that mobile phone in Japan on average cost 74% more than in North America. This might take some people by surprise, but the truth is that no one really gets a 0 yen or 1 yen phone in Japan; the price of the phone is paid out as a surcharge on the monthly bill as part of the service contract. Read more

Meiji, Morinaga to raise milk prices for first time in 30 years

It’s not often that we get to write something on Japan’s dairy industry, so we’re glad for the chance. First, some context:

Back in November, Meiji, Japan’s largest milk producer, announced that it would cut its profit forecast for this year’s net income by 23 percent. On the same day, Morinaga, Japan’s second largest milk producer, announced an 11 percent decline in profit for the first half of the year. A few days later, Daiwa Institute downgraded its assessment of both firms’ shares to ‘underperform.’ The reason? Higher producer costs were seen as eating into profits. A day after the downgrading, Meiji shares fell by 6.4 percent, and Morinaga’s dropped 7.8 percent.

Today, both firms announced that they would be raising their prices for the first time since 1978. It may seem like a coincidence that both firms made such an announcement on the same day, but it’s not. Milk prices in Japan are set through annual negotiations between dairy firms and about 10 groups that represent milk producers. The agreement announced today will result in about a 3 percent rise in prices for both Meiji and Morinaga, to take effect from April. It was announced that the price hike is necessary due to increased packaging and energy costs. Read more

Next Page »

Copyright © 2006-2008 Japan Economy News

Disclaimer