Thursday, July 19, 2012

30% salary increase in Shanghai

When I talk with management that are doing software development business in China they mention that they need to consider 30% salary increase every year to decide their pricing. Salary of the engineers in Shanghai is too close to the ones in some part of Japan and some of companies now make softwares outside Shanghai or north or south japan such as Sapporo, Okinawa and Kagoshima. Offshoring to China will make no sense in near suture for Japanese companies.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

2)Phone inquiries

Why are phone inquiries important?

If you are a sales person you know it. Just think about how much advertisement money you have spent to just get one phone call? People call you because email takes time. When people call it means in most of occasions they are in hurry. Customer in hurry tend to order more than normal customers.

So when you get phone call you need to listen what they want. An example in our business.

*Customers say they want to order 10,000 PCS of rubber charms and want them to be delivered within 3 weeks. Its too tight for us. What do you answer? Do you say we are sorry we can not make them? Then that person should leave. You should ask like do you accept partial delivery like 2,000 first and 8,000 later? Or ask them they are the end user or have end client. If they are the end user its relatively easy to complete the artwork.

Friday, July 6, 2012

1) Internet advertisement

Internet advertisement is an lowest cost and most effective way to get customers first attention. At least for some products. If you open an internet shop without advertisement, you will probably get very few access to your shop even when your shop is listed in top 10 rank with proper key words. I know it from our 4 year experience. Lets compare to other marketing./sales methods.


*Contracting with big internet shop. There are two big ones, rakuten and yahoo shopping mall. Both require legal company entity in Japan. Off course there is monthly fee to pay. If your product is BtoC and can be stocked, not order made, it might be a good choice to contract.


*Hire sales person. Its a good way if you are selling a few costly products to limited companies not individuals. Things like expensive medical devices are good for this way.


Most of small to mid business in Japan use 5K to 10K USD for internet advertisement. Two major ways to advertise, google adwords and yahoo listing. Actually users are 50/50. But YAHOO is used by people with less computer addicts. Heavy users of computer use more google.


Interesting story. A friend of mine is a famous Android developer as well as a owner of a company who hosts a android teaching class. When he advertise for the same key words he says google costs more. yahoo is cheaper. But we sell key chains, coasters and straps and yahoo costa usually more. This means that Android class you get more inquiry from Google and small charms from YAHOO. 

Thursday, July 5, 2012

How a small business in the US start sales in Japan?

By using internet advertisement it is now easy to start selling your product to Japanese market. I will show you one example.


We sell our PVC rubber charms to Japanese market. http://hotmobily.jp/ We use internet advertisement in Japan, google and yahoo, to get customer's first contact. But our products are mainly made in China and Thailand, customer emails and phone calls are answered in Thailand. We do have an office in Japan but it is to receive paper orders from some of clients or to send out sample products.


As you might know by now we are not really in Japan but we are selling our products to Japan. What we need to Japanese customers are internet advertisement, receive phone inquiries and sample product shipping.


So if you are a small business owner and are interested in selling your products we will take care

1) internet advertisement
2) phone inquiries
3) sample shipping


and you might expand your business to Japan. Tomorrow I will explain why 1) and 2) above are important.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Im at Buriam (Isan)

Lots of greens with no people. I guess soil is rich in nutrition and plants and trees grow quick. Impression of isan is green as the one of Kathmandu Nepal rock.

Friday, June 29, 2012

Posting again (Looking for a business partner in the US)


We are looking for business partner who can operate our rubber charm sales business in the US. http://hotmobily.com/


The business is to create promotional items such as keychains and coasters based on clients requirement. We have designers who can modify adobe artwork in Thailand and you do not need to spend lots of time for the art work.


We are now selling the products by the web site from Japan and have some difficulties.

1. We can not answer by phone. (We are on the other side of the globe.)
2. Sending samples is costly.
3. Answering email questions are not easy.


So now we are looking for business partner who can operate this business in the US. Best collaboration will be someone who now has SME and is looking for another products or channel. If you are interested in please contact me in the address left.

Economy in Thailand

A am asked questions like how is the economy in Thailand and I answer it is not bad. Here are some conversations that I had recently.


1) When I talk to recruitment company they say that the market is shortage of man power resource and a candidate may choose any job if he/she has moderate or better skill.

2) A guy working large food industry in Thailand says that raised salary 20% in April this year. The   government decided to raise minimum wage and the difference between minimum and inexperienced staff salary got small and they decided to raise minimum so that they can keep employees. Again it is 20%, not2%.

3)Unemployment rate in Thailand is less than 1%.

Despite flood last year the economy in Thailand does not seem to go worse. 

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Changing toward mobility

I see that about 10% of access to our pvc rubber charm sales site is from either mobile or devices like ipad. (mobile devices with full browser) The web site is targeted to Japanese. I expect that the percentage will increase dramatically in the next 5 years. For B to C we need to assume that mobile is the standard and pc is additional. I wonder what is the % in the US.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

looking for business partner in the US

We are looking for business partner who can operate our rubber charm sales business in the US. http://hotmobily.com/


The business is to create promotional items such as keychains and coasters based on clients requirement. We have designers who can modify adobe artwork in Thailand and you do not need to spend lots of time for the art work.


We are now selling the products by the web site from Japan and have some difficulties.

1. We can not answer by phone. (We are on the other side of the globe.)
2. Sending samples is costly.
3. Answering email questions are not easy.


So now we are looking for business partner who can operate this business in the US. Best collaboration will be someone who now has SME and is looking for another products or channel. If you are interested in please contact me in the address left.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Illegal music/movie download will be punished in Japan from 1st OCT 2012.

The law was passed on 20th June to allow police agency to penalize those individual who download illegal movie or music contents while they know they are illegal. The penalty is 2 year in prison and/or 2 million yes fine. The law will be in effect from 1st October this year.


Downloading illegal movie or music is illegal in Japan but there is no criminal charge for it. There exists only civil charge. I guess there are many people who get illegal contents from p2p applications such as share and winny and those will become completely illegal.


Will internet users in Japan start think about new ways to avoid this law? By the way streaming is excluded in this law.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Reverse offshore

Off shoring in IT industry is to make software in lower cost countries. For Japanese it means China. Thailand is also a country with low labor cost. It should be cheaper to make software in Thailand than in Japan.


But now I think it is time to start thinking about reverse off shoring. Especially large scale development. What I am concerned are 3 things.

1. Increasing labor cost and other costs in Thailand while decreasing labor cost and commodity price in Japan.

2. Time for translation and miscommunication

3. Inadequate number of engineers with high skill in Thailand while skilled engineers of both Japanese and foreign (China and Korea) in Japan.


I guess some of Japanse agree with this but there are not many who will actually reverse off shore the next project. Not easy to convince senior management.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Japanese IT companies coming to Thailand

In 1970s and 80s large manufacturing companies in Japan set up factories in Thailand to get the benefit of low labor cost. In 90s parts makers especially in auto industry came to Thailand to meet the needs for large makers. After year 2000 companies in trading industry came to Thailand and now companies in service industry such as IT, warehousing, catering and food are coming. I am in IT industry and I get more questions from large Japanese IT companies about setting up an branch office in Thailand. Set up an office is easy but counting business in Thailand and even growing is not an easy issue. Japanese IT companies usually target Japanese makers but it will be necessary to target both local Thai and non Japanese foreign companies to grow. The market is limited if they target only Japanese.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Brand image

This is our company's web site to sell personalized keychains and charms to the Japanese market. There are about 10 competitors in Japan and because of the size of its market all of 10 are in the similar business size, which is not large. I started this business because the products can be made in Thailand with lower cost and are sold in Japan with better price.


Since almost all of our competitors including us do not own their own factory to make product. So to attract customers what will be important? All of them are doing same business and selling the same products. After doing this business 2 years I feel that lower cost and faster delivery date are the most common things to be asked. Yes if we sell cheaper we get orders but we do not get profit. Yes if we can deliver faster but there is a limitation.


So now we are trying to build our own brand image. We chose 2 things that we value in this business. Highest quality of products and best customer relation service. For product quality we clarified what is considered as a defect products and what are ok products. It is posted on web site. We also show customer survey result to public. We use 3rd party survey system so that we can not modify result. It is a real message from customer. For customer relationship we have well experienced staff to answer questions from customer. They are not the people who joined a week ago and answering questions.



We will keep this way for sometime. If our industry becomes like airline that consists of high and low price business units then I will need to think again what needs to be our brand image.



By the way we are trying to sell the same products to the US market. We are operating from Japan and are looking for US partner who can provide call center/ customer support / marketing function in the US. Let me know if you are interested in becoming our partner. We will discuss in detail. (My email: kadota*youandearth.com , change * to @)