Case Studies

As the world’s third biggest economy, the Japanese market is an excellent opportunity for European companies to export their products and/or services. Despite the geographical distance, exporting to Japan is not overly complicated and it is not restricted to just the big companies. In fact, many European Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) import successfully to Japan. This page intends to illustrate how feasible and profitable this trade can be, by way of several case studies.

Table of Contents

• Abbeal, a French start-up specialized in web and mobile development consultancy
• Treefrog, a French biotechnology company specialized in cell therapy.
• SOCKSSS, a young Swedish company specialized in the fashion of socks.
• Super Garden, Freeze-dried berries, veggies, and ice cream from Lithuania.
• Citromil, a Spanish citrus products producer highly experienced in exports to Europe. The company followed training programmes to better adapt to the Japanese market.
• Cosylab, a Slovenian company that provides services for scientific experiments.
• Debailleul, a Belgian pastry- and chocolate-maker with high presence in Japan, despite having all the production based in Belgium.
• Lincasa, this Lithuanian company manufactures linen and wood home textiles of high quality.
• Prezi, small Hungarian software company that is actually changing the world's conception of the visual support for presentations. 
• Schleich, a German toy manufacturer that first entered the Japanese market in 2007 and in 2011 decided to open a Japanese branch of the company.
• Taflo Group: Originating in Sweden, Tapflo Group is a manufacturer and distributor of pumps for a wide range of industries and applications. The company first started its activities in Japan in the early 2000’s. Tapflo Japan was incorporated in April 2014 and the office officially opened in early 2015.

Within the frame of our activities in the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN), we published a 10-year anniversary booklet (2011-2021) highlighting some success stories of EU SMEs succeeding in Japan thanks to our EEN support.

JETRO as well regularly releases examples of success stories of foreign companies in Japan.