Going global first: instant noodles cross the Pacific (1970)

Entering before the market existed abroad

In July 1970 Nissin set up a subsidiary in Gardena, California, its first production base abroad. The move was of a piece with the Cup Noodle decision taken the next year: rather than wait for an overseas instant-noodle market to form and then fight for share, Nissin entered first and let its own product define what the category there would be. Hong Kong came in 1984, a capital tie-up with Beatrice Foods’ Hong Kong arm in 1989, and in 1994 the company’s first mainland-China production base began operating in Zhuhai.

The logic was first-mover advantage carried across borders — the same instinct that had built the domestic business, applied to markets where instant noodles were still unfamiliar. It handed Nissin an early foothold in the two regions, China and the Americas, that decades later became its main engines of growth. The cost of that instinct is its dependence on being early and being right: the strategy works precisely because the founder’s judgment about where a new market will form has, so far, kept paying off — a strength inseparable from the risk of resting the company upon it.