Build, don’t buy: reaching ¥1 trillion on organic openings alone (2025)

Choosing to build scale rather than buy it

The core of this decision is that the company cared, consistently, less about scale itself than about how scale was made. An acquisition takes in another firm’s stores, people and culture all at once — buying time with money — but leaves for later years the labour of re-aligning everything to a single mould. Cosmos chose, even though it took longer, to build one store at a time in its own mould, and reached ¥1 trillion without breaking the homogeneity of its format or its low cost. In this company’s habit of calling ¥1 trillion a waypoint, one senses a cast of mind that treats scale not as the goal but as a by-product of stacking up homogeneous stores. More than its rank as the fourth drugstore to reach ¥1 trillion in sales, it is the route by which it arrived there — without a single acquisition — that best reveals the character of this management.

That said, a shadow of limits falls on organic growth too. There is the debt swollen by bringing land acquisition in-house, the sluggish growth of existing stores, and the difficulty — mounting as scale grows — of holding every store to the same mould. While the industry buys time through consolidation, how long the choice to keep building stores can reconcile speed with homogeneity is a question not yet answered. Including its entry into a hotel business that uses land ill-suited to a drugstore, how far the company can hold to the principle of expanding without buying, in the next phase — that is where the true worth of this growth strategy will be tested.