Building Japan’s pioneering BtoB e-commerce model (2000)

Thoroughgoing customer focus, and the price of being called a pioneer

The heart of this decision lay not in the technology of the internet but in the fact that Askul first built a mechanism for taking customer requests into the centre of management, and then chose IT as the means of delivering on them. Carrying rival makers’ products and cutting prices were heresy to those defending the order of the stationery trade; to President Iwata they were simply the consequence of trying to stay faithful to the customer. It was that thoroughgoing customer focus, rather than the novelty of the technology, that appears to have driven the rapid growth.

That said, this success lent itself to being compressed by the media into a simple story about an “e-commerce pioneer.” The actual skeleton of the business rested on the patient accumulation of unglamorous operations — the agent network, the distribution centres — of which internet ordering was only one part. The gap between what really carried the growth and the image granted from outside, of a standard-bearer for the internet age, surfaced soon enough in how the market valued the shares after listing.