Proceedings of 3rd Global Business and Finance Research Conference
9 - 10 October 2014, Howard Civil Service International House, Taipei, Taiwan, ISBN: 978-1-922069-61-0
International Business Strategy of Food Business SMCS in
Japan
Kiyoshi Miyashita
Japanese food has spread around the world and its popularity is growing. Global popularity of Japanese
food has been supported by a wide range of people that use them and restaurant and small and
medium-sized food companies as well as large companies such as Ajinomoto. Internationalization of
Japanese food associated with its boom may cause big sales increase of processed agricultural products
and Japanese food ingredients as well as Japanese restaurant customers.
The current problems and key points of Japanese food companies as well as small and medium-sized
enterprises considering expansion to overseas will be presented with the report. At first, the current state of
the food business and Japanese food boom will be overviewed. It will explain why the food sector becomes
the important business domain of Japanese business in the future. Some previous research and theories of
management strategy for the globalization of food business would be used for analysis such as VRIO
framework (Barney, 2002).
Then, the reasons of the internationalization of multinational food companies are clarified and the current
situation of small and medium-sized food ones deploying overseas are considered. The interviews with
managers of several food processing organizations were conducted in September 2013 and July 2014 to
collect the direct information for the study. One of the reasons for these overseas expansions could be seen
that there is a limit of growth in the domestic market. The other is found to promote agriculture and to
support local community development and local economy.
In this report, food companies and their overseas expansion are analysed and the following implications for
internationalization is found. Food companies’ globalization should follow a management philosophy based
on four concepts: construction of the organization, inflection of the outside ability, security of the sales root,
and the market.
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Prof. Kiyoshi Miyashita, Graduate School of Economics, Oita University, Oita, Japan