Technology Transfer Webinar 12: Japan's Current Issues and Opportunities for EU Companies

How to build collaborations with Japanese Companies?

The general Japanese trends are introduced, such as population tendency, import / export ratio. Japanese population is radically decreasing after year 2000, and in 2040 it will become about 70-80% of current population. And the ratio of aged people is dramatically increasing. Japan is sometimes called as “World experiment place for aged society”.

The international / domestic market ratio in Japanese GDP is around 20:80. Japan is one of the typical domestic market driven countries like US, which is not so well accepted in other world to be understood, because Japan products are exported into all over the world and everyone knows Japanese exported products.

Japanese domestic market has been pretty large. For example, Tokyo metropolitan GDP is almost same as Australia, or Mexico. While the population of Tokyo city is 13M people, and Australia is 26M people. Thus, Tokyo’s GDP is about twice as big as Australia when we compare its GDP per person. Japan’s domestic market is now so huge.

But as in #1, the total population is radically decreasing, and the ratio for elder people is increasing. This means Japanese domestic market will start to shrink in 10 to 20 years from now if Japan does not take any initiatives for innovation.

There may be several initiatives for Japan to keep its power in the world, one is to introduce more people from all over the world to fulfil the lack of population or become a more export-oriented country. The key here in both cases is the language barrier. Typical Japanese people are not so good at foreign language / English.

Another key for Japan is how we can cultivate “Global Marketing”, as most of the companies relies on domestic marketing.

What is the typical Japanese people’s mentality to EU products? Japanese like Europe-made products in general sense, high technology products like gorgeous cars, high-price watches, light-weight bicycles, fashion, etc. The common aspects that Japanese love is the brand value which European companies have, and the high quality.

In these situation above, how EU start-ups can find a position in the Japanese market? Still, the Japanese domestic market is pretty big. Let’s discuss!

Registration deadline: 29/05/2017

What you will learn during this webinar?

In this webinar, we will cover the following:

• General Japanese trends in population and GDP, etc.
• How is the typical Japanese people’s mentality about EU-originated products
• How can EU start-ups approach the Japanese market?

Speaker:  Jun Miyazaki Ph.D. is currently the CEO of OrangeTechLab
Moderator: Luca Escoffier, Project Manager, EU-Japan Technology Transfer Helpdesk
Organiser: EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation - Brussels Office