Jun 20 2014

Japan's Use-Car Leading Company Drives Into Thai Market

After its founding in 1994, Gulliver expanded its showrooms to more than 400 locations all over Japan in four years. Named as one of the top-20 best employers in Japan, Gulliver bucks the trend in Japan with a plan to hire 700 workers there next year to serve its programmer to nearly double retail outlets there from 430 to 800 by 2017.Gulliver had attempted to expand to India, Russia, China and the United States, but decided to withdraw from all overseas markets except the US after being hit by the global financial crisis in 2008.

 

However, his work for co-president Takao Hatori was much more than a traditional secretary's job. Besides closely following the work and thoughts of Hatori, whose family founded and still holds some stake in the public-listed company, the young secretary was assigned to implement a new showroom format for Gulliver called "Wow Town".

 

Gulliver International, Japan's largest used-car company, has a grand vision - to do what 7-Eleven did to conquer the Thai grocery market - of modernizing the entire used-car business in this country. In this bid, which represents Gulliver's first renewed overseas expansion ambition since the global "Hamburger" crisis in 2008, the company has dispatched Katsushi Nomura, 33, a former secretary to a co-president of the Japanese parent firm, to head the Thai unit."I thought a top manager would have come by himself," he said last week. He was also surprised to learn about the assignment last year.