Company history

In March 1993 the stationery maker Plus set up an internal venture called the Askul Division — four people, a catalogue of some 500 items, selling office supplies by mail order to small and mid-sized businesses. Plus, founded in 1948, was a distant second to Kokuyo, which dominated through direct sales to large corporations and through mass retailers. The opening was at the other end of the market: small offices that nobody served properly. Running the venture was Iwata Shoichiro, who had joined Plus in 1986 after thirteen years in consumer-goods marketing at Lion Oil — a background in selling to households rather than to purchasing departments.

In early-1990s Japan there was simply no way for a small office to order a mixed basket from a catalogue and have it arrive the next day. The venture took that promise as its name — asu kuru, “it comes tomorrow” — and designed everything backwards from it: a catalogue distribution network, fax and telephone order desks, and nationwide shipping from a single centre in Tokorozawa. Crucially, it carried other makers’ products alongside Plus’s own, because that is what customers wanted; the range grew from 500 items to roughly 11,000 by 2000. Askul was never selling stationery — it was outsourcing a small office’s procurement.

A maker-owned division could not credibly act as a neutral buying agent for everybody’s products. So Askul separated. It registered its own trade name in February 1997, began taking orders over the internet in March, and in May bought the business out of Plus and restarted as an independent company headquartered in Bunkyo, Tokyo, with its own distribution centre in Saitama. Internet ordering in 1997 was early to the point of eccentricity — fewer than one in ten Japanese were online — but it followed from how the company was built: order data had to flow straight into warehouse operations, and internet technology was simply the cleanest way to wire that.

From there the pattern was expansion in two directions at once — coverage and customer size. Same-day delivery within central Tokyo began in 1998 for internet orders; the Tokyo centre opened in 1999, Fukuoka in 2000. The shares were listed on JASDAQ in November 2000 and moved to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in April 2004. In 2001 an “e-tailing center” put e-commerce and logistics under one roof, and in 2003 Askul Arena (later Soloel Arena) added a purchasing-management system that took the company upmarket into larger corporations. The one stumble was reputational: the market had priced Askul as an internet company, while the business was still carried by catalogues, fax lines and warehouses, and the share price corrected hard in 2001.

The 2000s were spent buying the machine outright. Distribution centres opened in Nagoya (2004), Osaka (2006) and Sendai (2007), all company-run. In April 2009 Askul bought the delivery firm Bizex, later ASKUL LOGIST, taking last-mile logistics in house. A month earlier, Plus had tendered part of its holding into a buyback and ceased to be the parent — twelve years after the spin-off, independence was complete on the share register too. In November 2010 Askul took 78.8% of Alpha Purchase, extending from office supplies into industrial MRO procurement, and a small consumer site launched in 2010 quietly rehearsed the move to retail.

The logic of the next move was that a logistics and web-ordering machine built for businesses ought to earn more if pointed at the far larger consumer market. In April 2012 Askul signed a business and capital alliance with Yahoo Japan, issuing new shares to it, and in November launched LOHACO, a consumer site combining Askul’s fulfilment with Yahoo’s traffic. The alliance was framed as an equal partnership. What it actually did was hand a meaningful block of voting rights to an outside party — trading the independence Askul had spent fifteen years winning back from Plus for a partner’s reach.

LOHACO grew but did not pay. A network optimised for delivering cartons to offices proved awkward for delivering parcels to homes; price competition on the Yahoo platform and the cost of maintaining delivery quality did the rest, and the losses accumulated year after year. Around it the group diversified by acquisition — a liquor mail-order firm in 2014, a bottled-water maker and the delivery company Eco Haiso in 2015, the pet-supplies e-tailer Charm in 2017 — while a 2015 buyback, structured under the alliance’s anti-dilution clause, kept Yahoo’s voting ratio intact.

The physical bet went wrong first. In July 2013 Askul opened ASKUL Logi PARK Shutoken, a company-owned centre of more than 72,000 square metres serving both next-day office delivery and LOHACO — the high point of a strategy of owning everything. On 16 February 2017 it caught fire, probably from friction in an overhead picking machine; the blaze burned for twelve days and consumed the building and all its inventory. Losing the hub overnight exposed what single-centre, self-owned logistics costs when it fails, and Iwata reversed course to what he called “management without owning.” The site was sold in November 2017, leased centres opened at Hidaka and in Kansai the same year, and in 2020 Askul reopened on the burned site — as a tenant.

From spring 2019 the board and Yahoo were openly at odds over how to deal with LOHACO’s accumulated losses, the terms of the alliance and the buyback policy. In June Yahoo said it would vote against re-electing President Iwata; in July it and Plus, the second-largest shareholder, disclosed votes against Iwata and against all three independent outside directors. Askul’s independent directors argued publicly that the partnership’s equal footing had been lost and that the company’s independence as a listed issuer was being violated. On 2 August 2019 the meeting removed all four. Iwata left after twenty-two years and four months, succeeded by Yoshioka Akira, a career insider who had been COO of the consumer business — and Japan’s corporate-governance debate acquired its defining case on parent-subsidiary listings.

Yoshioka’s agenda was repair. LOHACO was pushed toward profitability by merging its logistics with Askul’s own, narrowing the range and adjusting prices; the distribution network was rebuilt on leases and automation, with the Miyoshi centre reopened in 2020, a Tokyo centre in 2021 and the automated ASKUL Kanto DC at Ageo in June 2024. Askul moved to the Prime Market in April 2022, and that December Alpha Purchase floated on the Standard Market — twelve years after being acquired, valued as a listed company in its own right. In 2023 the group added AP67, whose Feed subsidiary supplies dental practices, completing a row of category specialists: MRO, pets, dentistry.

In July 2025 the company set out a plan to the year ending May 2029: sales of ¥600 billion, a 5% operating margin, 20% ROE, and a vision it calls “Beyond Retail” — a CEO-level unit running proofs of concept, an investment envelope of up to ¥100 billion for M&A, and a target of splitting profit evenly between existing and new domains by 2035. The starting point is uncomfortable: the year to May 2025 closed at $3.2B (¥481bn) in sales with a 2.9% operating margin, held back by depreciation on a new website and the Kanto DC, and the following year is guided lower still before a recovery. Thirty-two years after four people started a catalogue inside a stationery maker, the company is again arguing that it is not really a retailer.