Entering Japan: what the first 90 days decide for a foreign technology company

Foreign technology companies tend to arrive in Japan with a market thesis: the customers are there, the technology is better, the timing is right. The thesis may be correct and still fail, because in Japan a technology finds its place through partners before it finds customers. The first ninety days decide which partners will take the company seriously, and that decision is hard to reopen. This note sets out what those weeks should contain and the mistakes that make them longer than they need to be.

Weeks one to four: facts before meetings. Japanese counterparts check before they engage. They will look for a registered entity or a credible representative, a company profile that matches the public record, references that answer the telephone, and a consistent story about what the company wants in Japan. The first month is therefore spent on the company's own facts: the entity that will contract, the decision-maker who will attend, the technical data that can be shared under confidentiality, and a one-page statement of what is being sought (a supplier, a manufacturing partner, a customer, a public programme, a co-investor in an operating company). It is also spent mapping the landscape: which primes, suppliers, agencies and programmes are relevant, who competes for the same partners, and in what order approaches are normally made. Public programmes have calendars; missing one can cost a year.

Weeks five to eight: the first meetings, in the right order. In most sectors the order is agency and prime first, suppliers second, financing later. Approaching several primes at once, or approaching a supplier before its customer, is noticed and reads as inexperience. The first meetings are held in Japanese, with the company's decision-maker present, and their purpose is not to close anything: it is to be understood, to learn the counterpart's own constraints and to earn the second meeting. A note is sent afterwards, in Japanese, restating what was heard. Most of the value of a Japanese first meeting lies in that note.

Weeks nine to twelve: follow-up and the scoping decision. By the third month the pattern is visible. Some counterparts have asked for data or a second meeting; some have gone quiet, which in Japan is usually an answer. The company can now decide, on evidence, whether to commit to a scoping study, a Japan Desk or a defined mandate, and with which partners. The alternative, continuing to take meetings without a plan, is the most common way companies spend two years in Japan with nothing to show.

Four mistakes that cost time. Leading with valuation or investment before a partner has asked about either; treating public programmes as a menu of grants rather than as programmes with their own purposes and administrators; announcing the market entry publicly before any Japanese partner has agreed to be named; and changing the story between meetings. Each is remembered. None is fatal if caught in the first month.

What a good ninety days produces. A short list of partners who have agreed to a second conversation, a clear view of the public programmes that fit and their calendars, an understanding of what the company must change (in its product, its entity or its pricing) to be taken seriously, and a decision about the next twelve months that the board can defend. It is a modest outcome, and it is the one that every successful entry we have seen began with.