Launching Takkyubin: from third place in line-haul to the household parcel market (1976)

What it means for a third-place firm to become the creator of a market

The heart of the Takkyubin decision can be seen in this: it stepped away from the competition to chase profitable corporate freight and instead built into a business the very market for individuals that everyone judged could never pay. Drawing a theory of density from the deployment of collection vehicles observed in New York, and laying the spread of the telephone network over it as the route to profitability, was a turn that could not have emerged from an extension of the existing line-haul freight business. It was a decision that resolved the disadvantage of being third not by trying to catch up head-on, but by changing the ground on which the contest was held.

That said, this turn was not realised by the soundness of the management theory alone. Being able to start at all, in the face of opposition from his father Yasuomi, the entire board and the whole workforce, came about through an unusual route for a business decision: the chairman’s concession out of feeling for his son. Completing the national network took twenty-one years from entry, and regulation as an external factor long governed the speed of diffusion. That Takkyubin went on to stand out as a source of profit to the point of being called “one-legged management” tells, in inverted form, just how large the fruit of that first decision was.