Marui Group - Company History
- Founding
- In February 1931 Aoi Chuji (青井忠治), then twenty-seven and a native of Toyama Prefecture, took over the Nakano shop of Maruni Shokai (丸二商会), the instalment-selling merchant he worked for, and set up on his own. The instalment trade of the day was run by men from Ehime Prefecture, and Aoi began in it as an outsider. He placed his shops close together along the Chuo Line so that the collectors' rounds ran efficiently, and in March 1937 he incorporated Marui with capital of ¥50,000. It was a shop with goods on its shelves, yet from its first day it also carried the working practice of finance — a monthly collection kept in a ledger.
- The Decision
- What the company sold was not goods but a way of splitting the payment. Aoi Chuji travelled to the United States in 1952, met card settlement there, and in 1960 changed the name of the arrangement from instalments (月賦) to credit and issued 50,000 store-only cards in the first year. A computer came in-house in 1966, online credit checking in 1974 and instant issuance at the counter in 1975, moving the judgement on credit onto machines step by step. In 1980 it switched its merchandise to young-oriented fashion and built selling floors where expensive DC-brand goods could be bought in instalments. In 2003 it traced more than a decade of retail decline to its own institutions and carried out voluntary redundancies, performance-based pay and a systems overhaul all at once, but the reform cost the trust of its staff and was withdrawn after four years.
- Today
- More than eight-tenths of profit comes not from retail but from finance. In the year to March 2025 segment profit was $294M (¥44bn) in FinTech against $57.5M (¥9bn) in retail, and in revenue FinTech accounted for $1.2B (¥179bn), seven-tenths of the total. The dividing line was 2006, when the Supreme Court ruled the grey-zone rate unlawful and the revised Money Lending Business Act took effect: Marui, holding $2.1B (¥250bn) of loans, rebuilt its financial business around the general-purpose Epos card. Over the fifteen years to March 2021 it worked through cumulative interest-refund provisions of $1.1B (¥125bn) while shifting its earnings to merchant fees and to instalment and revolving charges. Of retail revenue of $504.5M (¥76bn), goods bought in and sold on came to only $12.7M (¥2bn); the rest is rent and fees.
- Competition
- Marui issues the card and also owns the place where cardholders are gathered. The Epos card can be issued the same day at a Marui counter, and the selling floor itself works as the entrance for new members. Among the other distribution-group issuers, Credit Saison issued internationally branded cards of its own and widened its merchant network beyond the Seibu department stores, stacking up cards issued from the side that holds no shops. Marui, for its part, gave up consignment buying in 2015 and moved to floors let mainly on fixed-term leases, narrowing the selling floor to two roles — a source of rent and an entrance for members. Where department stores competed on floor area, Marui's standing is now settled by merchant fees and the number of members.
Timeline
1931–1980From instalment shop to a downtown department store running on card credit
- 1931Aoi Chuji buys the Nakano branch of Maruni Shokai and sets up on his own
- 1937Marui incorporated with capital of ¥50,000
- 1945The Nakano store is illegally occupied
- 1952Aoi travels to the United States and encounters card settlement
- 1960Issues a store-only credit card; 50,000 cards in the first year
- 1962Opens the Shinjuku store; closes small shops to concentrate resources
- 1963Lists on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
- 1966Brings a computer in-house ahead of the trade
- 1970Passes Midoriya to lead the instalment department stores in sales
- 1972Aoi Tadao (青井忠雄) becomes president
- 1973Buys the former Nikkatsu Teitoza site in Shinjuku 3-chome
- 1974Online credit-checking system goes live
- 1975Begins issuing credit cards on the spot in stores
- 1980Shifts the merchandise mix to young-oriented fashion
1981–2005High profit leaning on cashing, and the crisis deepened by grey-zone interest
- 1981Enters cashing, lending at about 27% in the grey zone between two laws
- 1984DC-brand sales reach $130.5M (¥31bn)
- 1987Twenty-six consecutive years of rising sales and profit; DC brands at $737.2M (¥107bn)
- 1988Cardholders pass ten million
- 1993Revenue falls; the record run ends and retail enters a long slump
- 2003August: reform of pay, staffing and systems — later judged a failure
- 2003Enters e-commerce in earnest
- 2004Employment terms, appraisal, pay and systems all change in parallel
- 2005Aoi Hiroshi becomes president and representative director
- 2005Cashing gross profit $592.8M (¥65bn); loan balance $2.3B (¥250bn)
2006–2023The Epos pivot and a rebuild run through dialogue
- 2006January: the Supreme Court rules the grey-zone rate unlawful
- 2006April: partners with VISA and begins issuing the Epos card
- 2006December: the revised Money Lending Business Act weakens the balance sheet
- 2007Performance-based pay abolished; the 2003 reform is halted
- 2011Unprofitable stores cleared; the company falls to a net loss
- 2012April: large-scale transfer of staff strengthens the card business
- 2015Retail converted from consignment buying to fixed-term leases
- 2018February: investment in and collaboration with ventures begins in earnest
- 2020January: D2C & Co. established
- 2020Eleven consecutive years of profit growth achieved
- 2021Cumulative interest-refund provisions reach $1.1B (¥125bn) over fifteen years
- 2022April: moves to the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
Founding Story
1931–1980From instalment shop to a downtown department store running on card credit
Marui began in 1931 as a single instalment-selling shop in Nakano, bought out of the firm its founder had worked for, and spent the next half-century converting the machinery of instalment collection into something faster: a store credit card in 1960, a computer in 1966, an online credit-checking system in 1974, and cards handed over on the spot from 1975. Each step turned the store into a place that recruited cardholders as much as it sold goods, and by the end of the period the goods themselves were being swapped for the young-fashion labels that credit could carry.
An outsider from Toyama in a trade run by men from Ehime
In February 1931 Aoi Chuji (青井忠治)[1], then twenty-seven and a native of Toyama Prefecture[2], struck out on his own by buying the Nakano branch of Maruni Shokai (丸二商会), the instalment-selling merchant that employed him[3]. The instalment trade of the day was dominated by men from Ehime Prefecture, and Aoi, coming from Toyama, stood in it as an outsider. In an era when a university graduate started on ¥60 a month, the fact that he had accumulated savings of ¥11,000 — some ¥36 million in today's money — shows how profitable the instalment business was, and he went independent as a manager who understood its profit structure from the inside. Aoi later recalled those first years: They could hardly even understand the way I spoke; I was treated as a heretic and was terribly unhappy. I had made a great show of setting out, and then I wrote a letter home to my birthplace saying I would simply die.
[4] He built a distinctive expansion model, clustering shops close together along the Chuo Line so that the collectors' rounds ran at maximum efficiency, and on 30 March 1937 he incorporated Marui with capital of ¥50,000[5].
After the war the company resumed trading even while facing the illegal occupation of its Nakano head store, and Aoi, having travelled to the United States in 1952 and been struck there by American credit-card culture[6], took the step in 1960 of issuing Marui's own store-only credit card[7]. Fifty thousand cards were issued in that first year[8], and the company began internally to shift the ledger-keeping of instalment selling onto the new form of the card. It was the moment when a labour-intensive form of business turned into one with an information system at its core, and it was also a declaration of intent to remake, from the inside, the model the company had carried since before the war. That practical experience became the origin of Marui's card business, running on to the online credit-checking system and to instant issuance in the stores.
The Shinjuku gamble: ¥400m staked by a company capitalised at ¥360m
Entering the 1960s, Marui shifted the axis of its management away from being a federation of small instalment specialists along the Chuo Line and towards stores in front of the major stations of central Tokyo. Opening the Shinjuku store in 1962 meant committing $1.1M (¥400m) against capital that then stood at $1M (¥360m) — a concentrated investment larger than the company's own capital. It was qualitatively different from the earlier strategy of tying together provincial bases, and it was a decision that cut off the line of retreat for the founder and for the whole company alike. Aoi Chuji announced it internally in the words this will decide the fate of our company
, and entered the central-Tokyo trading area ruled by long-established department stores such as Mitsukoshi and Isetan with instalment payment — a distinctive means of settlement — as his weapon of differentiation.
In an age when department stores dealt mainly in cash or in credit paid off in a single instalment, Marui's pay-by-instalments captured the demand of young customers who could not buy expensive goods outright. Between 1966 and 1971 the company closed ten small shops to concentrate resources on its principal stores, and in 1970 it passed its rival Midoriya (緑屋) to take first place in sales among the instalment department stores. Marui pursued full-line instalment department stores in central Tokyo, holding the Chuo Line corridor at high density, while Midoriya took the national-chain route of scattering small stores across the whole Kanto region[9]; the difference in store strategy showed up as a difference in results. In a single generation the outsider had overtaken the Ehime men who had led the trade since before the war, and the concentrated Shinjuku investment — larger than the company's capital — took concrete form eight years later as the seizure of the top position.
Instant in-store issuance and DC brands behind twenty-six straight years of growth
Marui, which had brought a computer in-house in 1966 ahead of the rest of the trade[10], put an online credit-checking system into operation in 1974[11] and began issuing credit cards on the spot in its stores in 1975[12]. A mechanism by which a young visitor could walk out with a card in hand worked as a point of difference against the existing department-store cards, and it created, ahead of the industry, the distinctive structure in which the central-Tokyo stores doubled as the acquisition channel for cardholders. Instant issuance was an advanced arrangement that took competitors a long time to match, and as a strategy of differentiation built on continuous investment in information systems at the centre of management, it became the base that supported the twenty-six consecutive years of rising sales and profit that followed. Aoi Chuji described his approach as follows: Measured against my management creed of thin and long, being lifted up too high is not something I enjoy
[13] — the posture of a man who tightened the reins hardest when things were going well.
The 1980s brought the boom in DC brands (designers' and characters' brands), and Marui caught the current early, increasing its handling of expensive fashion. DC-brand goods sat in a high price band from tens of thousands of yen to over ¥100,000, and combined with instalment payment on the Marui card they produced a structure in which young customers could afford that consumption experience in the central-Tokyo stores. The business model in which three elements — the card, the flagship downtown stores and the DC brands — reinforced one another was highly distinctive even within the distribution industry of the day. DC-brand sales expanded more than threefold in three years, from $130.5M (¥31bn) in FY1984 to $737.2M (¥107bn) in FY1987; in 1987 the company reached twenty-six consecutive years of rising sales and profit, and in 1988 the number of cardholders passed ten million.
Notes
- Marui Group, annual securities report, 沿革 (corporate history) section↩
- Marui Group, annual securities report, 沿革 (corporate history) section↩
- Marui Group, annual securities report, 沿革 (corporate history) section↩
- Noda Keizai, July 1963↩
- Marui Group, annual securities report, 沿革 (corporate history) section↩
- Marui Group, annual securities report, 沿革 (corporate history) section↩
- Marui Group, annual securities report, 沿革 (corporate history) section↩
- Marui Group, annual securities report, 沿革 (corporate history) section↩
- Decide, April 1987↩
- Marui Group, annual securities report, 沿革 (corporate history) section↩
- Marui Group, annual securities report, 沿革 (corporate history) section↩
- Marui Group, annual securities report, 沿革 (corporate history) section↩
- Nikkei Business, 14 October 1974↩
References & sources
- Noda Keizai: July 1963, Riding the Wave of the Consumption Revolution — Aoi Chuji; August 1969, The Marui Way of Business, Ahead of Its Time.
- Nikkei Business (Nikkei-McGraw-Hill / Nikkei BP): 14 October 1974, Marui — the High Returns Born of Devotion to Credit; 27 October 1986, Marui — the Original Now Moves Away from Credit.
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