Fenetre Partners is a leading consulting firm for market entry into Japan and business development in Japan. We provide our clients with market research, distributor & partner search, B2B business matching, marketing & sales rep and trade support.

　Even if there are many foreign companies that consider entering into Japanese industrial market, it would be quite difficult for these companies to find appropriate sales engineers who can manage representative offices. The reasons are as follows.

1. Long time employment culture

Most of Japanese business people expect their companies to hire them until they will reach to their retirement age such as 65 years old. It is not common in Japan to fire an employee, even if he or she does not achieve good performance. If you establish your office in Japan, you might not be sure whether you will be able to operate this office. Therefore Japanese business people do not prefer to work for representative offices of foreign companies, as there is risk that they would not be able to work until their retirement age.

2. Lack of English speaking sales engineers

Japan is 2nd biggest economy country, therefore you might think that there seemed to be many international and English speaking sales engineers. However, it is not true. Because of Japan’s bad English education, Japanese people generally do not speak English. Therefore there are not many sales engineers who speak English. (According to a survey, Japan is 2nd worst country of TOEIC score in Asia…) So it would take a lot of time and cost to find such people in Japan.

3. Expensive salary

Because of the above reasons, it would be difficult to find Japanese professional sales engineers who know international business and of course English. Only the way to find such people would be followings:

(i) Their salary should be much higher than average salary of Japanese sales engineers.

(ii) You would need to find sales engineers who are just retired from their companies. In case of such people, they do not expect you much salary as they should have already earned a lot.

Therefore if you want to start business in Japanese market with minimum risk and cost, it would be good choice to outsource it to Japanese companies like us.?Otherwise, it would take a lot of time and cost to find appropriate person or business partner in Japan.