Daifuku U.S.A.: the first move into North America (1983)

Returning to the market it borrowed its technology from

Filed away as one more instance of a Japanese manufacturer going abroad, the timing of this move is hard to see. Where Daifuku went was the home ground of Jervis B. Webb, the company from which it had borrowed automotive transport technology in 1957. What it carried with it was a product line it had raised itself in Japan — Japan’s first automated guided vehicle, the Pronto, and the Rack Building System of high-bay automated warehouses. The sense that it had finished converting borrowed technology into products of its own is what appears to have set the timing.

The 1983 subsidiary did not, however, immediately become a pillar in North America. It remained a single site serving car plants, and the North American base that includes airports and e-commerce logistics was not in place until the stretch from the 2007 acquisition of Jervis B. Webb to the 2013 purchase of Wynright — a full quarter-century after the founding. An overseas market opens not in the year a company puts a subsidiary there, but in the year it has something it can sell.