Trading Company Industry

The trading company industry covers businesses that buy, hold and sell a wide range of products for consumer, business and government customers, and it has been shaped most distinctly by Japan's general trading companies, known as sogo shosha. Trading companies work as importers or wholesalers, keeping stock and delivering goods to shops and large end customers, and today the term mainly describes global business-to-business traders that specialise in one goods category and run strong logistics. The Japanese sogo shosha differ from trading firms elsewhere, which usually specialise, because they run extremely diversified business lines: besides acting as intermediaries they provide logistics, plant development and other services and take part in international resource exploration. Their breadth gives them risk management across many markets and currencies, in-house market information systems and the scale to offer credit and financing at low cost. After the Second World War, the trading arms of the dissolved zaibatsu and Kansai textile and steel traders grew into about ten large diversified firms by 1960, among them Mitsubishi Corporation, Mitsui and Co, Sumitomo Corporation, Itochu and Marubeni. Since the 1980s they have shifted toward services such as finance, insurance, transportation and real estate development.