Even though the world economy is being hit by a crisis due to Covid-19. There are three Japanese Businessmen who are still very rich and have abundant wealth. In the previous article, we have talked two of them, Quoting from celebritynetworth, Thursday (13/5/2021) here are the last one:
Tadashi Yanai (US $ 48.7 billion)
Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai is the richest person in Japan. He started three decades ago with a dilapidated t-shirt shop that he reluctantly inherited from his father. Yanai has plans to try himself at the shop.
One shop is not enough, he wants to build an empire. It was the early 1980s and Tadashi greatly admired the work of American management scholar Peter Drucker whose business philosophy dictated that money and morality need not be mutually exclusive.
Yanai can build his empire and become a very rich person without destroying his soul. From Drucker’s teachings, Yanai learned that it is best to think first about what the customer wants, rather than what the company or owner wants to sell.
Therefore, he quickly added women’s clothing to men’s clothing stores and rebranded the entire operation in 1984 to Unique Clothing Warehouse which was later shortened to Uniqlo.
He also immediately began expanding to the suburbs. In the late 1980s, Yanai began studying and perfectly imitating everything The Gap did. Uniqlo imitates The Gap business model by producing and exclusively selling all of its own clothes.
Copying The Gap proved to be a massively successful strategy for Uniqlo and its parent company Fast Retailing. In 1993, Tadashi made a truly unprecedented step for a Japanese company. It shifted all of its production to China. This allows him to cut the cost of the clothes he sells and further increase his profits.
During the economic downturn in 2008 and 2009, Yanai made acquisitions. He bought Theory and Helmut Lang, both high-end designers of basic wardrobe components. All acquisitions come under the umbrella of the company Fast Retailing, of which Uniqlo is still its biggest asset.
