Company history

IDOM began in October 1994, when Kenichi Hatori founded Gulliver International Corporation in Koriyama, Fukushima. Used cars conventionally moved through dealerships; Hatori entered instead as an independent buying specialist — purchasing cars directly from their owners and reselling them through dealer-only auctions. Coming from outside the trade — he had reached this founding by way of used-car sales after a 1976 business failure that left him with roughly $1M (¥300m) in debt — he was willing to doubt the industry’s conventions, reading a seller’s wish to let a car go quietly and turning trade-ins into auction lots.

The specialist model could only scale if appraisal and inventory could be reduced to a system. In 1996 Hatori moved the franchise headquarters to Urayasu, Chiba and renamed the company to carry its main brand. From 1997 the Dolphinet system standardized on-site pricing so that even a non-expert could appraise a car, and centralized inventory management at head office — inseparable from the fastest possible national franchise rollout, which reached 500 stores by 1999. A 2005 patent on automated appraisal turned the method itself into intellectual property.

The financial ascent was as fast as the store count. Registered with the securities dealers’ association in 1998, listed on the Tokyo Second Section in 2000 and promoted to the First Section in 2003, Gulliver reached the top board just nine years after founding — a record pace — and won the Porter Prize in 2006. An outsider’s single-minded focus on standardizing one act had built a national chain at record speed.

In 2008 founder Kenichi Hatori stepped down as president — staying on as chairman with representative authority — and handed the company to an unusual two-brother co-representative structure: eldest son Yusuke Hatori (born 1971) and second son Takao Hatori (born 1972). For a listed company, sharing the top office between two siblings was rare, and it made the family’s internal coordination the anchor of the company’s stability.

The second generation pushed to broaden beyond domestic buying. A US foothold (Gulliver USA, 2004), some group tidying, and preparation for a new-car dealership business (making Tokyo My Car Sales a wholly owned subsidiary in 2013) all followed — but the US venture never reached scale, and the real pivot into new cars waited until 2015.

In September 2015 IDOM acquired 67% of Australia’s Buick Holdings, a multi-brand new-car dealer with roughly $165.3M (¥20bn) in annual revenue — its first overseas business of real scale and its first step from used-car buying into new-car retailing. The same year, sole leadership consolidated under Yusuke Hatori. A two-axis structure — domestic used-car buying plus an overseas new-car dealer — now formed the base for the wider mobility expansion to come.

In July 2016 the company renamed itself IDOM — freeing the corporate name from a single business while keeping Gulliver on the storefronts. In August it launched NOREL, a flat monthly car-swap subscription and an early bet on the shift from ownership to usage, and the same year it entered China. Under Yusuke Hatori the used-car buying base was extended into a multi-axis mobility business — used cars, new cars, subscription and overseas.

The company’s realism showed as much in retreat as in expansion. Having bet that its domestic standardization strengths would transfer straight to Australian new-car dealerships, IDOM fully withdrew from that business by 2022, after just seven years — judging pillars by whether they earned and reallocating without sentiment. Through the COVID trough and the withdrawal, it still set record profits, redirecting the freed capital toward large-format domestic retail.

The 2024 mid-term plan (2023–2027) then turns resources back toward domestic scale: growing large-format outlet superstores from 53 toward 100 by early 2027 and, ultimately, 500, with flexible siting that no longer clings to major arterial roads and buying, selling and servicing handled under one roof. It reproduces, at superstore scale, the standardized appraisal-and-inventory chain of the founding used-car business. A concentrated founding-family holding of about 41.6% persists, shifting from personal to asset-management-company ownership to prepare the next succession.