Teruaki Kojima Full-time manager, Industrial Materials Team 1, Industrial Materials Department

Taking the initiative to introduce products that are friendly to people and the environment.

Teruaki Kojima Full-time manager, Industrial Materials Team 1, Industrial Materials Department

Business opportunities will open up for those who perceive the changes of the times and apprehend needs that lie just down the road. Nowadays, with the spread of the SDGs, environmental awareness is increasing, and products that are friendly to the environment and the human body are in high demand. Against this backdrop, Daimaru Kogyo’s Industrial Materials Department has been dealing in environmentally friendly industrial chemicals for the past eight years. Teruaki Kojima, who works at the Nagoya office based in Aichi Prefecture, a hub for manufacturing companies in Japan, has been visiting various factories in an effort to catch and anticipate the next needs. “I felt that people were interested in products that were not only environmentally friendly but also safe for the health of workers,” he says. The product that Kojima aggressively marketed was a cleaning agent that is essential in the manufacturing process. It is actually a product of a major chemical manufacturer in the United States that manufactures and develops chemical products. This was one of the projects that Daimaru Kogyo was able to contract through its global network.

Expanding trust through diligent sales activities.

He had confidence in the health- and environment-conscious products originally developed by the U.S. manufacturer. “These are very attractive products, and if we had the opportunity to let our customers know about them, we could certainly close the deal.” However, the market for industrial cleaning agents was mature, and it was not easy for newcomers to gain entry. Since the products were not price-competitive, Kojima visited companies one by one. “I promoted the product to major companies in Japan that were environmentally conscious. Most of the time, it was almost like door-to-door sales, and it was difficult to reach the person in charge. I repeated steady sales activities such as mailing catalogs, and for some companies, it took as long as one or two years to approach them.” Kojima’s sincere and continuous sales efforts have brought us closer to our customers and clinched us many contracts. In his humility, he says, “I guess it was a good match for today’s environmentally conscious times.” However, these have become one of our mainstay products. For non-Japanese companies, numbers are everything. After building a relationship of trust with the U.S. manufacturer by achieving results, the next step was to expand to Southeast Asia.

As the exclusive distributor for Southeast Asia.

Daimaru Kogyo has local offices in Thailand and Indonesia, which it uses as a base to expand its business operations in Southeast Asia. “We saw that Japanese manufacturers were moving their factories from China to Southeast Asia, so we decided to target Southeast Asia as a future market.” While this meant targeting Japanese companies in the area, we planned and sold products in cooperation with these local offices, which understand best how to do business in Southeast Asia. As in Japan, we were able to increase the number of orders through diligent activities; however, in Southeast Asia, many of these orders were of a much larger scale. “The most impressive was a massive request for an entire container of 80 drums. I was very surprised, because we usually sell on a scale of two to five drums.” There are currently three distributors for the U.S. manufacturer in Japan, of which Daimaru Kogyo is merely one. However, we were the first to enter the Southeast Asian market, and have acquired the position of the sole distributor there. In the future, we plan to use the trust we have built up to date to further expand our market. “Environmental awareness is on the rise worldwide. I would like us to take this opportunity to work as a team to develop products that anticipate the needs of the market.”