owner, Suntory Holdings, aims to boost global sales. Photo: William DeShazer for
ID: 448019 • Letter: O
Question
owner, Suntory Holdings, aims to boost global sales. Photo: William DeShazer for The Wall Street Journal
By Tripp Mickle
May 4, 2015
A temporary bar popped up in Tokyo’s Roppongi entertainment district last summer. Stacked on a long counter were 700 bottles of Jim Beam bourbon.
Young people were the target crowd for the Jim Beam Bar. The 30 cocktails on the menu used Jim Beam in ways likely to strike American bourbon drinkers as heresy. Among the popular ones—the Citrus Beam Highball, made with its namesake Kentucky bourbon, club soda and freshly squeezed lemon, orange or grapefruit.
That exercise in cross-cultural pollination was the work of Suntory Holdings Ltd., which bought Beam Inc. last year for $13.6 billion, creating the third-largest liquor company in the world. To help pay back debt amassed in the deal—one of the biggest-ever overseas transactions by a Japanese company—Suntory is trying to double global spirits sales by 2020.
Hitting that goal won’t be easy. Suntory will have to outpace industrywide growth in its two biggest markets, the U.S. and Japan, and expand into new markets. While bourbon sales have been on a tear in the U.S., pushing Jim Beam in Japan is another matter. And selling Japanese whiskies in the American market, where Yamazaki, Kakubin and other Suntory brands are largely unknown, is likely to be even tougher.
At the same time, another challenge looms: meshing two vastly different corporate cultures inside its new global liquor subsidiary, Deerfield, Ill.-based Beam Suntory Inc.
What appears to be the business strategy of this firm and is it likely to succeed?
Explanation / Answer
Suntory is trying to capture the market share is Japan. But it is not easy task because there are too many cultural and social differences in American and Japanese. Companies are in diversified liquor area. So they are capable to adopt the variable strategies as per the Japanese market. The employees of Beam thought that the joined business will increase their business and they will also get the benefits of it. Japanese believes on consensus, stress modesty whereas Americans believes on flexibility, frankness and speed.
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