LENS
Companies whose overseas business, products or store footprint reveals a different face from the one familiar in Japan.
Do not let the home-market image define the whole company.
Capcom is not only a company that must keep landing new hits. New releases reactivate older games, while digital distribution, PC, global pricing, media use and licensing extend the selling life of IP. An in-house engine and more than 3,000 developers support that cycle.
Zensho is less a company that owns a very large beef-bowl chain than a global food-infrastructure operator: restaurants, sushi takeaway, retail and other formats connected to a system that designs procurement, manufacturing, logistics and sales together.
ROUND ONE is less a chain of bowling alleys than an operator of large indoor entertainment boxes, continuously refreshing the reasons to visit through crane games, collaborations, sports, karaoke, standardized operations, and new formats.
Ryohin Keikaku looks less like a specialist household-goods retailer and more like a company expanding everyday-life touchpoints through products, stores, apps, community activity, circularity and accommodations.
Don Quijote looks less like a retailer that simply stacks up cheap goods and more like a retail market-share platform that uses price to drive traffic, then combines food, private brands, tax-free demand and new formats to expand the share of each shopping mission it captures.
Rather than a merchandise company dependent on one star, Sanrio has become a character-IP portfolio business that rotates and grows many characters, scales them globally through licensing, and is now moving into self-published games and in-house animation.
Rather than moving away from games, Nintendo looks like a company built to sell games for a long time and invest heavily in whatever comes next.