Looking at the overseas market over the past six months, sake exports have clearly declined. With the exception of China, most countries, including the U.S., have seen year-on-year declines. The cause was particularly noticeable in the U.S., where consumption, including food and beverage, rose dramatically during the latter half of Covid-19 pandemic. It might be difficult to understand this situation in Japan, where the "stay home" campaign was so effective during the pandemic, but consumption in America, which had been forcibly suppressed during the first half of the pandemic, rose in the second half as a reaction to that suppression. I believe that the national momentum to "restore a strong America" was also a driving force. Because of this, consumption continued to exceed more than what it should be.
Moreover, the shortage of marine containers contributed to this situation. Since it was a common understanding among local sake importers that containers could not be obtained and therefore sake could not be imported, the sake breweries took the attitude, "If we have containers, let's stock them anyway. The sake breweries were of the opinion that if they could get containers, there would be plenty of demand and exports would grow. This led to sales that far exceeded actual consumption from the year before last year to last year.
If the movement of goods far exceeds actual consumption, stagnant inventories in the market naturally lead to slow sales. I believe this is the reason for the drop in the statistical value of sake exports over the past six months.
However, what worries me here is China. As I mentioned “With the exception of China”, the export statistics still show 105% growth. On the other hand, I really feel like, “That's dangerous.”
Some people might say, “They're buying from us, so it's fine.” However, I feel the risk of that Chinese companies would possibly fall into the common trap that some Japanese company including “DASSAI” fell into.
Injustice has been happening in workplaces of leading Japanese companies and leading companies in each industry. The management team unanimously says, "The injustice was done without being informed," but what they all have in common is that the management was not aware of the current situation. This unreasonableness led to excessive internal pressure for performance, and became a corporate culture that resulted in M&A failures and fostered the seeds of fraud in the workplaces.
DASSAI was no exception. The same thing happened to us as well. I was oblivious to the situation in which the front line was pushing too hard to meet the ever-increasing demand. This led to a lack of management, which resulted in an incident of unmixing after water adjustment, and led to the replacement of all the products in question.
I am sorry to say in a bossy manner, even though I have made the same mistake. However, from my point of view, the current distribution in China looks the same as the situation that Japanese companies were in.
As far as China is concerned, it is a foreign country for us and there are a lot of companies that we don’t do business with. Thus, there is actually nothing I can do about it here. . . But I am just concerned. I hope we can land well. No, I hope that all the distributors of sake in China can somehow make a soft landing with a superficial injury. We are having a heart-to-heart discussion about this issue with the wholesalers who carry DASSAI. It is because we would like our wholesalers to succeed.
Also, it is easy to be misunderstood that mentioning the other Japanese sake breweries is “just a check on our competitors,” but we would like the other Japanese sake breweries to observe the local situation, rather than simply “sell sake”. A poor attempt to oversell will lead to quality problems for sake as a whole. It could also be fatal to individual brands in the future.
However, despite these bad conditions that sake is currently facing in the global market, I am optimistic in the long run. The market will recover. I believe so. Until then, we have to be patient.
I apologize for telling the story of the bad economy this time. When I started writing this diary, however, I felt resistance to common assumptions that breweries were often deified as if they were seekers, or that quality was an afterthought for the sake of sale. Anyway, I started this site because I wanted to write about the true feelings as Kuramoto. Please be patient sometimes to listen to me about such a bad economy.