Tomo Nakagawa's Profile

Satoshi, its biggest strength is the distribution network. Given the nature of the product, I found quality of milk is really tough to differentiate as the taste is similar and every player weigh on quality control to retain customers’ reputation.

In Vietnam, most of the customer reach points are individual papa-mama shops and customers are loyal to their close papa-mama shops because of the poor infrastructure condition. Therefore, penetration to the small papa-mama shops is the biggest diffrentiation factor.

After having studied FB in the case, I realized how much network effect creates and captures value for the company. LinkedIn is definitely the other great example of the network effect. Today, the company seems to focus on matching professionals and companies but it seems it has healthy ambition to broaden its business perspective to other human capital related field such as education.

LinkedIn is not yet popular in Japan and I haven’t utilized but this made me want to use the product more!

It is great to deepen our knowledge about the topic we learned from the case. BYD is such an interesting company about making their leap from manufacturing batteries to automobiles.

It totally makes sense to form JV with Mercedes-Benz and it seems that the alignment of interest is solidly formed. The more interesting things are, the challenges and problems you illustrated which attribute to the nature of 50%-50% joint venture. It is very insightful to know the problems caused by the organizational structure and the task and responsibility of each entity. I wonder whether these issues are solved today or any measures have been taken.

I did not know about Blue Apron. Its business is really intriguing and it definitely attracts people with fewer family members as it provides time and cost efficiency by improving their logistics and reducing wastes.

JIT really makes sense for this business model as the matrials are perishable. However, it seems it currently relies on labors to do packaging which would incur a fair amount of cost. I also wondered how many recipes that Blue Apron offers. Do they offer the all 800+ recipes? If so, I wonder what is their process (i.e. job shop etc) to manage the packaging process effectively to cope with the vast range of product offerings. In addition, I feel it must be tough to optimize the supply of materials and numbers of labors if they offer a vast range of recipes and apply JIT, and I am curious to know how they are addressing the issues.

Chipotle is my favorite and it was really good to learn about their operation model.
I didn’t know that they can serve 300people / hour which is amazing!
Also, as a customer, I really liked the simple and clear product offering but did not realize we had 65,000 choices.
I think the basic range of food offering may not be as many as those of competitors. However, the taste and option customers have would contribute to obtaining customers’ buy-in.

A food industry cannot avoid from food poisoning issues, no matter how big a company is. However, I just hope Chipotle keeps tackling the food safety and quality issues and continously serves us good food.

Winning the Bundesliga 25 times and UEFA Champions League for 5 times is just amazing!
I recall the moment that Germany won the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the team consisted of around 6 starting members who belong to FCB.
The German national team’s sophisticated teamwork and organized move captured all audiences.
As you wrote, I heard FCB is really good at its player development. Also I am impressed by its healthy financial position and its ability to bring talented people from outside including the former FC Barcelona coach.

However, one drawback would be, because it is too strong and dominating the Bundesliga, it may affect the overall dynamism of the league. Havind said that, FCB is one of my favorite team in the world.

Adzmel, that is exactly right. They have honed their supply chain network by a building coexistence relationship which becomoes vital to the community. In emerging markets, the cost to build the relationship is relatively low compared to the expected benefits for both parties.

Pepper is such an interesting product. I remember people were skeptical and shocked about hearing that the telecom giant Softbank to move into the robotics field.

Surely they leveraged their stores to use as marketing channel. I remember that Pepper is placed in many stores in Tokyo and people are inevitably attracted. I was also one of them. I talked to the robot sometime last year during my lunch break in a weekday. Though, his / her response was neither punctual nor satisfactory enough to convince me to purchase it.

Having said that, I love the concept of “Pepper Pioneer Club” and “Pepper’s Creator’s Contest”. Sotbank is renowned for its marketing skills and they leverage its strength to facilitate its development process. Their subscription pricing model seems to provide Sotbank its flexibility about offering new subscription packages as they develop more functions or applications in the future. Or, maybe they aim to broaden revenue sources not only from the end users but also from application developers and other network services providers which provide services through Pepper. In any way, Pepper opened our eyes to see the future of our lives with handy robots and Sotbank made an epoch making step to bring robotics into the retail field.

I love the story as Sake fanatic. This is the first case that a company brought disruptive innovation in the luxury sake market, eliminating black box human factor. However, it really raised sentiments among Sake lovers about the company’s decision to eliminate Sake production masters “Toji”, as they consider the Tojis are the most precious asse.ts of the Sake brewery. I know many traditional Sake lovers left and seek other brands.

Having said that, I truly think the CEO made a bold step. There can be many way to produce genuine products and this surely is one of the ways. Moreover, Dassai contributes a lot to make Sake fun in the world.