Betting on overseas: compact tractors for North America (1972)

Sidestepping the giants with a small tractor

The core of this decision was reading, ahead of the market, that domestic growth had a ceiling. President Keitaro Hiro judged that Japan’s rice mechanization was essentially complete and warned repeatedly that replacement demand would arrive “within five years at the latest,” and on that conviction he shifted Kubota’s centre of gravity from the saturating home market to overseas. The 1972 founding of Kubota Tractor Corporation in the United States, and the 1974 entry with Japanese-style small tractors, deliberately avoided the 100-plus-horsepower machines the American makers fought over. Kubota aimed instead at the 20-to-40-horsepower compact class and sold it not to commercial agriculture but to home gardens and vineyards — a niche beneath John Deere and the other giants, where it faced no head-on fight.

The choice built the export business that later carried the group. The “Japanese-style small tractor” image translated to Europe — France, Germany, Italy — through the 1970s, and the escape from domestic dependence let Kubota keep expanding through the 1980s and 1990s even as the founding pipe business stagnated. The same instinct — win where the incumbents are not, on a product tuned to a use they overlook — is the disposition that runs from the founder’s domestic water pipe to the compact tractor, and it is why overseas farm machinery, not the pipe that made the company’s name, is the business the group is built on today.