Made in Japan 🇯🇵

The First episode of the Made in Japan podcast is finally out. (Link in reply) We felt our interview with Philip was going to be the perfect first episode as an introduction to Japanese markets. Over the last 2 decades, he’s seen the country as a lawyer, investment banker and now an investor. He’s worked with truly the pioneers of Japanese activist investing like Yoshiaki Murakami of M&A Consulting and Seth Fischer of Oasis. Through his adventures not just in Japan but in East Asia, he has so many interesting stories to tell! We learnt ⚪︎Why Activism Struggled in the past and why that’s changing ⚪︎Why Activism, and Japan, is still a huge opportunity today ⚪︎Some of the misconceptions of Activism ⚪︎Japan’s unique business culture and how Japanese companies think about M&A ⚪︎And some of his favourite things to do in Japan! We still have alot to improve on so we’d love to hear your feedback, thoughts or suggestions if you have any!! Or even any guests that you’d want us to interview! We hope you enjoy this conversation. If you liked it and want to hear more, we would really appreciate it if you like this post, retweet, and subscribe! Thank you for your interest and support ♥️🎌 Finally a special thank you to the people around us who’s been so encouraging and supportive for this project. Ben and I still have no idea where this’ll go but we hope to bring some unique perspectives!

Can’t wait! Going to be epic! Anyone getting in from Japan??

Wow. Asics vs Nike

Being a perma bear is not only a terrible way to invest but a terrible way to live! You're spending your days finding ways to be pessimistic only to be lauded for 5 minutes every 20 years. Optimists always win bc they build. But hey, being a perma bear is good business.

Muji >>>> Rimowa

Nowhere else in the world can you lose your phone, and someone will take it to the police station for you to pick up. ❤️

The first issue of our weekly newsletter is now online! Included here: -Interesting news of the week -Weekly Screener: Buybacks, Activists, Funds, Super investors, Insider transactions, other spontaneous ideas. -Something weird is happening with AI in Japanese Equity Research -Updates on Photosynth, Saizeriya, Ebrains -Bonus Intending to make it THE undisputed resource for investors on Japan. Give me your feedback on what you like, don't like and what you want to see more of! And if you liked it, I would deeply appreciate it if you could share it :) Thank you! 🇯🇵🗾

The company that helps employees quit their jobs will be listing up stats on which companies have the most resignations! Could be very interesting data point on corporate culture at any given firm.

+++I'm adding a new format!+++ Recently, I've found myself with more and more ideas and meeting notes piling up and going unshared. There's also observations and field notes I never had the right format to share through. After tinkering and thinking about how to accelerate that and what I would want to use as an investor. I've decided to send out a weekly update every Sunday. In a world full of AI crap, I'm not going to be dumping raw data. My goal is to use my experience to curate the most interesting ideas and insights on Japan. This will evolve on the go, so I'd love to hear what you'd like to see. For now, you can expect: 1. Interesting news of the week 2. Weekly screener covering buybacks, insider transactions, and ownership filings from super investors/funds/corporates + other more serendipitous ideas. 3. Updates on holdings 4. Shorter-form notes/field notes etc. 5. Bonus stuff It's a work in progress but my goal here is to make it a dot connector for key insights and ideas in Japan. If you have any feedback or thoughts, I'm all ears. And otherwise, see you with Issue #1 this Sunday!

Its wild to see, so many websites were down for ‘maintenance’ which was either preventative or putting out fires. Long live the fax machine I guess.

Insanity, the real reason why they had to raise prices was because growth in customer numbers was way more than they were expecting....!! They couldn't procure raw ingredients fast enough and had to pay a higher price.

What a comeback if they succeed, Nike’s founder Phil Knight started his business originally selling Asics shoes

Some of my fav findings from Part 2: As of 2023, Saizeriya sold 100 plates of their Milanese Doria per store per day. With their 1000+ stores that means they serve at least 100,000 plates a day. Annualised thats more than 36 MILLION. They’ve been reinvesting into their customer flywheel for the last 50 YEARS long before $COST or $AMZN even existed They have a factory in australia entirely dedicated to make the meat sauce and bechamel for the doria. In one family 3 generations works at a Saizeriya. They developed a mobile game app to train their staff. No boardroom politics because the founder makes it so that you become busier as you move up the ranks. Literally everyones too busy. In a year The founder received more than 10,000 emails from employees across the organisation with feedback on how to improve the stores. He reads through all of it. When there was traces of melamine in the pizza dough, they refunded everyone who ordered a pizza, including people who lost their receipt! They sell imported mozzarella for ¥299 which is cheaper than if you’d get it in Italy. When they had just 3 stores, the founder started a central kitchen. With a dozen stores he approached major food producers to make private brand products for them. When they cut the time to open/close a store by an hour it saved the millions. When they tried to lower the production cost of rice, they realised that farmers were using harvesters that were used just one week of the year and was replaced every 5 years! 40% of their raw ingredients are produced in-house, and 50% directly sourced. Only 10% uses distributors Saizeriya has been using AI as early as 2018 in order to forecast customer footfall which in turn makes staff placement more efficient. Finally, once I release Part 3 it’ll most probably reach 100 pages worth of writing and this Saizeriya Deep Dive would basically be a book! 😅😭

The sad part about missing this trade is that I could’ve just been visiting ramen shops and eating ramen while my money 20x-ed but no, here I am being swung around by this stupid market 💀

🍜>>>> AI 💀

With all the corporate cyber attacks happening there’s a non-zero chance that Japanese companies will revert to using more fax again.. 😅 Maybe Japan was right after all 😂

Not surprising, likely learnt english living abroad, so appreciates Japan more than the average Japanese after living elsewhere.

Just saw a tourist telling off a silly tourist to get in line boarding a train. I think we’re gonna be okay 🥹🇯🇵