- Duty Free Specialty Transforming To
Cross Border Digital Retailer - Looking back, the First Chapter of our company history was that we were an Electronic Appliances Specialty for the first eight decades, and the Second Chapter was a Duty Free Specialty for the past decade. The whole world came under COVID 19 distress last year, and it significantly affected our second chapter who led the fast growing “inbound tourism” industry in Japan.
- Finding the current difficult business environment as an excellent opportunity to transition to the third chapter, we accelerated the business transformation last year, downsizing Bricks & Mortar network, rationalizing inventory and reducing overall cost to do business while growing Live Commerce and eCommerce, and internalizing the growth from China and Southeast Asia.
- LAOX corporate DNA has been all about deepening specialty. In the domestic market, we plan to launch highly differentiated, digitally integrated new specialty formats and scale them rapidly.
- Chinese market and Southeast Asian market have been steadfastly growing despite COVID 19. In China, we have been focusing on the First Tier Cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen for the past several years, and established a strong business foundation. Going forward, we will expand to the New First Tier Cities and the Second Tier Cities that are even growing faster. In addition, we will start investing our business resources in Southeast Asia more than ever to capitalize on upcoming consumer segments. One of LAOX’s strengths is cultural diversity assured by multilinguistic capability as well as in-depth understanding in each market. We leverage this strength to accelerate overseas business expansion such that no one else can.
- LAOX has been known as an “Inbound” focused company in the recent past. Now we are ready to be also regarded as an “Outbound” driven company. Our newly launched Outbound Division helps manufacturers in Japan penetrate in Chinese and Southeast Asian markets appropriately, applying consumer insight based, “Market-in” approach.
- Shaddy is one of core subsidiaries of ours. It celebrates its 96th year this year, and still goes strong as one of the largest gift specialties in Japan. Shaddy has also started company wide transformation. Shaddy’s best asset is the consumer-centric partnership with 1,300+ sales agents across the country. Shaddy’s DX centralizes on Consumer-centricity, assuring the improvements are always for agents to serve local consumers. Its product developments follow the same suit. Some Shaddy private branded products have been already rolled out after rounds of consumer hearings, and resonating extremely well.
- Newly founded LAOX Digital intends to leverage innovations from every corner of the world, and supports DX for all LAOX Group companies. Shaddy’s logistic subsidiary formerly known as Three Heart has been renamed to LAOX Logistics and promoted to support all logistics networks LAOX Group companies owns and expands including overseas logistics.
- Rapidly transforming operational companies and enabling professional service companies are growing LAOX businesses. Stay tuned and don’t miss out our endeavor to the Centennial.
- GO BEYOND. LAOX.
Yiwen Luo, Chairman
Ken Iida, CEO