Winding up the founding wholesale business and consolidating into the retailer ABC-Mart (2002)

The etiquette of handing over a name

What is interesting about this decision is which corporate entity was kept. The surviving company was ITC, the founding business, yet the name it took was the retail subsidiary’s. As a legal procedure the form is unremarkable, but it is also a choice about which half of its own history a company shows the outside world. Miki Masahiro erased, in public terms, the name of the import wholesale business he had spent seventeen years building, and installed as the name of the whole company a retail banner begun with a few dozen employees. Given that the business being wound up ran margins around 25%, it can be read as a judgement that measured the future not by the quality of the earnings but by the number of places it could sell.

What remained after the switch was less the store network than the purchasing craft accumulated as an importer-wholesaler: negotiating directly with brands, managing contract manufacturers, constructing prices — all of it works unchanged on a retail floor. In an era when the major brands lean toward direct sales and are selective about which retailers they supply, that background functions as a competitive condition. Yet a structure in which store growth depends on new shopping-centre development looks like the old problem of having only a limited number of customers to sell to, continued in a different shape. Choosing what to depend on may not, for this company, be a one-time exercise.