iNvestigate: Step 3 to G.A.N.B.A.R.E

There’s a lot you can do by yourself to qualify the Japanese market for your products.  

JETRO (the Japan External Trade Organization) is a good source for broad overviews of some common markets.  Their accurate and reliable information ranges from basic how-to export overviews to more up-to-date industry data.  But as good as JETRO can be, there’s no way they can cover every product area.  This is where Google comes in handy but of course the reliability of that information suffers the further you get away from known sources.  

In Japan there’s an association for everything.  Interested in selling to the Japanese semiconductor equipment industry?  The Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan (SEAJ) is a good place to find information on your prospects. Navigate on that site to the Member’s link and you’ll find a listing of manufacturers.  SEAJ’s English and Japanese pages are very similar and more importantly, up-to-date.   But be careful!  Not all associations keep their English language pages up-to-date and not all associations have English language pages!

There are so many Japanese industry associations you can usually just search by just adding “association” behind an industry or product type.  Say you want to sell something to Japanese chicken farmers.  Searching on “Poultry Association” brings up the “Japan Poultry Science Association” and the Japan Poultry Association’s.  However, the latter’s statistics are behind a pay wall so if you want current statistics on the Japanese poultry industry, your Japanese better be up to snuff because it’s not available in English.  But it is available in Japanese!

Don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Don’t have the time or resources to do it yourself?  Asia Business Group can do it for you!

Contact us for more information.