Company history

Matsumoto Kiyoshi opened a drug dealer’s shop in Kogane, Matsudo, Chiba, in 1932. He had left school after elementary grades and taught himself for the licence, and he picked his site by a simple rule — a street with people on it and no pharmacy. If a customer asked for something he did not stock, he ran to another shop to get it; to make a thin inventory look deep, he lined the empty boxes up on the shelves. The shop took his own name, written in katakana so that anyone could read it, on the reasoning that there should be exactly one such name in Japan. In 1951 the stores were unified under that name and the business was incorporated.

Kiyoshi was a merchant and a politician at once. Town councillor, then a member of the Chiba prefectural assembly, he became mayor of Matsudo in 1969, telling the city’s staff that he was the president of Matsudo City Inc., they were its employees and the residents its customers — and creating, that same year, a “Do It Right Away” department to answer them. From then on politics was the family’s occupation and the pharmacy a family trade, run by relatives. For nearly forty years after the founding, what the pharmacy actually was — a business or a sideline — was never settled.

Kiyoshi’s eldest son Matsumoto Kazuna took the presidency in 1975 while sitting in the prefectural assembly and later the Diet, so the shop floor was run by a professional from outside the family, Kuniyuki Kiyoshi. Kazuna had attended an American retailing seminar with his father and brought back chain-store theory almost unknown in Japan at the time; he called his version of it glocal — gather information globally, trade locally — and packed stores into Matsudo and its neighbours. Clustering paid: one leaflet run covered the whole district, and staff and stock could be shuffled between branches. By April 1988 the network reached 174 stores, anchored on 37 in Matsudo, 25 in Kashiwa and 27 in Tokyo. In 1970s Matsudo the group also ran supermarkets, convenience stores and a burger franchise; the pharmacy was one line among several.

In July 1987 the company took a site in Ueno Ameyoko. The building cost about $2.8M (¥400m) to lease — heavy for the company then — but Ueno was the Joban line terminus the founder had traded around for decades. Copying what it had seen in American drugstores, it replaced the dim, hard-to-enter Japanese pharmacy with bright lighting, an open frontage, deep assortment and cosmetics testers: a shop you could enjoy browsing.

The customers there were nothing like the Chiba housewives the chain knew — they were young women, and Kazuna rebuilt the store around them. Hair care was stacked up for the “morning shampoo” fashion of the day, the entrance door was removed so nobody had to open anything to come in, and, decisively, the chain-contract cosmetics sold at manufacturers’ fixed prices gave way to general cosmetics it could price as it liked. That single store did $1.4M (¥200m) of sales a month.

Ueno was the proof of a formula — city-centre station front × cosmetics × young women — and the company committed to it. It listed over the counter on the Japan Securities Dealers Association in June 1989 and spent the proceeds on prime sites in Ikebukuro, Shibuya and Shinjuku; a move to the Tokyo Stock Exchange followed in 1996, and to the First Section in 2000. Debate from 1991 over scrapping resale price maintenance on drugs and cosmetics pointed the same way, toward freely priced goods. Kuniyuki declared in 1996 that the chain would open thirty to forty drugstores a year and add ¥10 billion of sales annually to pass ¥100 billion by the year to March 2000 — investment concentrated on the drug-and-cosmetics format rather than the group’s supermarkets and home centres. From 1996 to 1998 it opened seventy stores a year, one every five days. The trade press called it the “Matsukiyo myth.”

The myth dimmed around 2001. Aeon’s Jusco took a stake in Welpark that February, bringing a distribution group into the city-centre fight, while Sundrug, Tsuruha and the regional chains that would later form Cocokara Fine — Seijo and Segami — turned national. Prime station-front sites were spoken for within two or three years, and the winning formula of the 1990s, being simple, had been copied until it no longer distinguished anything. Growth would have to come from territory the chain did not yet hold.

From 2004 Matsumoto Namio set a pace of ninety to a hundred openings a year and pushed west into Kansai and Kitakyushu, where the chain had seven stores at the end of that year and wanted roughly thirty percent of its network. Doing it alone was slow, so from 2005 it took stakes in established local chains instead, and in October 2007 it reorganized as a pure holding company — the first in the drugstore industry — fixing in law the split between group strategy and capital allocation on one side and regional buying and store operations on the other. Over 2008–2017 it bought mid-sized chains across Tohoku, Chubu, Kansai, Chugoku-Shikoku, Kyushu and Hokuriku until the map was national rather than Kanto-heavy.

Two experiments framed the decade. It bought the wholesaler Mogi Yakuhin Shokai in 2008 to bring procurement in-house, then sold that business to Alfresa Healthcare in 2014 — choosing retail focus over owning distribution. And it went abroad, reasoning that the station-front format it had built for Japanese shoppers already suited the inbound Chinese customers lifting its domestic numbers: a joint venture with Thailand’s Central Group agreed in 2013 and launched in 2015, then Taiwan (2018), Hong Kong and Vietnam (2019) and Guam (2023). Revenue rose from $5.4B (¥435bn) in FY11 to $5.4B (¥591bn) in FY19, up 36% — real growth, but growth inside a market where share was being fought over and good sites had run out. The next move would have to be consolidation of the industry itself.

Cocokara Fine was courted by two suitors at once, and Matsumotokiyoshi Holdings beat Sugi Holdings to the preferred-negotiation rights. A basic agreement in January 2020 became a share exchange in October 2021: Cocokara became a wholly owned subsidiary and the parent renamed itself Matsukiyococokara & Co. A new Matsumotokiyoshi Group company was spun off to hold the Matsukiyo head-office functions, while the two groups’ merchandising and store-support work was pooled into what became MCC Management.

The numbers arrived fast. FY21 sales of $6.6B (¥730bn) were 34% above the year before; FY22 reached $7.2B (¥951bn) and FY23 $7.3B (¥1.02tn), crossing a trillion yen for the first time within three years of the merger, with FY24 at $7.0B (¥1.06tn). Operating profit climbed through the same four years, from $373.5M (¥41bn) to $541.3M (¥82bn). Matsumoto Kiyoo, president of the holding company since 2014, stayed on as the merged company’s first president — and in autumn 2024 graded his own integration 60 to 70 out of 100, reckoning on a year to verify merchandising and three to fuse logistics and systems.

With the merger targets met early, a new medium-term plan in May 2025 turned to shareholders: a 6% dividend on equity and a 50% payout ratio by the year to March 2031, on a progressive dividend policy, after a FY24 of roughly $204M (¥31bn) in buybacks, $110.9M (¥17bn) in dividends and $121.5M (¥18bn) of debt repaid. Growth is now being sought off the shop floor as well as on it: AppBrew, which runs the cosmetics review platform LIPS, was acquired in December 2024 for its product and marketing data. And the roll-up continues — Keiport (April 2024), CFSC in welfare-equipment rental (October 2024), TMC and Dominant in the Tama district (May 2025) — adding dispensing pharmacies and nursing-care adjacencies as Matsumoto points at ¥1.3 trillion. A drug dealer’s shop of 1932, a station-front brand of the 1990s, and now the axis of an industry’s consolidation: the through-line is a company that has twice reorganized itself around a structural change it saw coming — deregulated pricing, then industry-wide merger.