New businesses

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.

Yamaha is not moving away from being an instrument maker. It is extending the sound technologies and musician relationships built through instruments into spaces, cars, software, and ongoing services.

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.

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.

Oriental Land was not merely trying to increase attendance: it was raising the value of each visit through experiences, hotels and heavy capital investment, while preparing to move its next growth platform beyond Maihama and onto the sea.

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.