Building an own global sales-and-service network (1970)

Owning the channel from the factory to the jobsite

The logic behind Makita’s expansion was not simply to sell in more countries but to control how its tools reached the people who used them. After the 1957–58 pivot to power tools, Makita chose to reach carpenters and builders through service centres it owned rather than through independent distributors — first across Japan from 1962, then abroad from 1970, when it opened Makita USA and followed with sales companies through Europe and Oceania. Because power tools need constant repair and consumable parts, a repair counter that was Makita’s own turned routine servicing into something a distributor could not offer: the fast fix that made a tradesman ask for Makita by name the next time. Owning the whole channel, and paying for it out of its own cash, is the structure that produced Makita’s durable pricing power.

What that choice bought, and what it cost, are two sides of one decision. Owning the network gave Makita margins, loyalty and a self-financed path to a place beside Bosch and Stanley Black & Decker among the world’s three big power-tool makers — it never needed an outside partner to grow. But the same reach pushed roughly four-fifths of its revenue outside Japan, so that the yen’s swings and the building cycle of whichever mature market turned first now moved its results as much as its products did. The strength of the model and its chief vulnerability are the same fact: Makita answers to the whole world’s jobsites because it chose to serve them directly.