Company history

In December 1987 Kamata Masahiko founded Kanto Sokuhai in Koto-ku, Tokyo — a handful of employees running same-day deliveries in light vans. The parcel market was held by Nippon Express, Yamato and Sagawa on national networks, and a late entrant with one depot could not meet them there. So he did not: he took the small, urgent, regional work that the majors found hard to make pay, and spent roughly a decade in the unglamorous business of getting bigger at it.

The name changed with the ambition. It became Sogo Butsuryu System — “integrated logistics system” — in 1989, a statement that the company intended to take on logistics work as a whole rather than deliveries alone. Through the 1990s, as manufacturers moved production offshore and retailers shifted to frequent small-lot replenishment, Japanese demand moved from moving volume to managing it, and third-party logistics — running a client’s entire logistics operation under contract — became a real business. Adjacent ventures followed: a light-work staffing company in 1997, a marketing company in 1998, and in 1999 a third renaming, to SBS, to hold the mix together.

Two structural moves at the turn of the decade mattered more than any of the operations. In December 2003 SBS registered its shares over the counter with the Japan Securities Dealers Association, the predecessor of JASDAQ — modest for sixteen years of work, but the funding infrastructure for everything that followed. In July 2004 it converted into a pure holding company. Together, listed equity and a holding structure made it possible to buy a company, hang it beneath the parent, and consolidate its finances and governance while leaving its name and its way of working alone. Around the same time Kamata sold the mail-delivery business and committed the company to 3PL.

In May 2004 SBS bought Snow Brand Logistics — the cold-chain arm being cut loose as the Snow Brand group contracted after its 2000 food-poisoning scandal — and with it refrigerated warehouses and low-temperature know-how it had no other way to acquire. A company that had earned about ¥700 million in ordinary profit the previous year committed to a tender offer on the order of ¥16 billion. In June 2005 it took the Tokyu group’s logistics subsidiaries in a single block, and in 2006 a food-logistics company and an insurance agency. In April 2006 it renamed itself SBS Holdings and moved its head office within Tokyo. Nineteen years after the first vans, it was a diversified logistics group.

What made this repeatable was not capital but a proposition. Large manufacturers wanted out of logistics to concentrate on their core; almost no one in the industry was willing to take a subsidiary whole — its people, its customers, its costs — rather than pick over the assets. SBS was, and made a point of not restructuring afterwards. The seller’s interest and the buyer’s interest met in a gap nobody else was standing in.

Then the gap closed for a while. Revenue stalled at ¥147.1 billion in 2007 and ¥139.4 billion in 2008, and ordinary profit halved from ¥7.9 billion to ¥4.0 billion as freight volumes collapsed after the Lehman shock. SBS suspended new acquisitions through 2009–2010 and worked on costs; recovery was slow, with ordinary profit of ¥4.3 billion in 2010 and ¥1.6 billion in 2011. The overseas moves of these years — India in 2011, a Southeast Asian regional headquarters in Singapore in 2012 — were less an expansion strategy than following Japanese manufacturers to their offshore plants.

In March 2012 SBS acquired Zero, a specialist in finished-vehicle transport, adding cars to the list of things it could move. That December it listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and in December 2013 moved up to the first section — nine years after the over-the-counter registration that had funded the buying spree.

In June 2013 it renamed fourteen logistics subsidiaries at once into the SBS family — Snow Brand Logistics became SBS Frec, Tokyu Logistic became SBS Logicom, and so on — typically five to ten years after each was acquired. This is the second half of the governance design: leave the acquired organisation’s culture alone, but unify the face it shows the market. Internal autonomy with an external single name became the settled operating method of a company that intended to keep buying.

The step change came in August 2018 with Ricoh Logistics, the wholly owned precision-equipment logistics arm of the copier maker, for an estimated $208.3M (¥23bn). By the year to December 2019, revenue reached ¥255.5 billion and ordinary profit ¥10.2 billion — up 66% and 57% respectively on two years earlier. The receiving vessel had proved it could take a very large deposit.

The pattern accelerated. Toshiba Logistics followed in November 2020 for about $112.4M (¥12bn), and Furukawa Logistics — with its steel and non-ferrous handling — in December 2021. Ricoh, Toshiba and Furukawa in four years fixed SBS’s standing in the industry as the default home for a manufacturer’s non-core logistics subsidiary. The sellers wanted focus and cost transparency; the buyer got trained staff and an existing book of business in a single transaction.

The pandemic pushed the other way at the same time, collapsing face-to-face retail and inflating e-commerce volumes. Revenue went from ¥257.2 billion in 2020 to ¥403.5 billion in 2021, ordinary profit from ¥10.9 billion to ¥20.5 billion, and SBS spent heavily on new distribution centres and automation around Tokyo — logistics fixed assets rose about 55% between 2019 and 2021. The company moved to the TSE Prime market in April 2022 and has since grown at roughly 5% a year, reaching ¥490.3 billion of revenue and ¥21.1 billion of ordinary profit in 2025.

Rather than slow down, SBS bought three more companies in little over a year: NSK Logistics in October 2024, the Dutch 3PL holding company Blackbird Logistics in April 2025 — its European foothold — and Bridgestone Logistics that October. Kamata, still president after thirty-eight years, is steering the group toward ¥1 trillion in revenue. The open questions are the ones that scale creates: how to keep the quality of post-merger integration even across so many deals, how to govern the overseas subsidiaries, and who succeeds a founder whose judgement has been the mechanism itself.