Entering the housing business and diversifying toward “everything for living” (2011)

Does the way you win in appliances carry to the home?

The point of this diversification was to redirect the management resources left idle in a shrinking appliance market toward the adjacent field of housing. Connect the nationwide stores and their customer data, and the price-bargaining power honed in appliances, to the home — the most expensive purchase of all — and the transaction value per household becomes incomparable to that of appliances. Gaining a foothold with S-by-L, supplementing technology and scale with Hinokiya, and binding in even furniture and finance through the holding-company structure: that whole sequence has advanced along the single picture Chairman Yamada calls ‘everything for living.’

Yet appliances and housing breathe to a different rhythm as businesses. Appliances are a business of turnover — selling cheap and in quantity; housing is a business of standing beside a once-in-a-lifetime, high-value decision. There is no guarantee that the winning method that mastered appliance retailing on low prices and many stores carries straight over to housing, where both the frequency and the unit price are of a different order. The record of having grown housing into a second pillar, and the length — ‘another 25 years’ — needed to build out the big-store network: the distance between these two marks where the everything-for-living strategy now stands.