Ubiquitous Mitsui

Japan's Mitsui & Co., Ltd., manufactures nothing, retails nothing. It is, instead, one of the globe's great middle men. "If anyone anywhere in the world has anything to sell or buy," says a recent company ad, "we are at his service." Mitsui makes good on that promise by providing commercial services for business ventures of every kind. Last year the 300-year-old firm turned an $8.1 million profit by handling transactions totaling $4.5 billion, solidifying itself in the process as the biggest of Japan's 6,400 trading companies.

All-purpose trading companies are to Japan's economy what the convention industry is to Atlantic City's. Since homegrown resources are limited, it is possible to prosper only by luring outside business. Though the trading companies were originally established to move goods from one area of Japan to another, the larger ones now concentrate on international trade as well, deserve much of the credit for postwar Japan's emergence (Time cover, Feb. 10) as the world's fifth biggest commercial power. Fully 80% of Japan's burgeoning exports and imports are handled by its trading companies.

Know-How & Know-Where. Mitsui accounts for more than 10% of the nation's foreign trade, a success story rooted in its corporate history. For generations, the company was part of the vast, family-held Mitsui Bussan combine, one of the powerful zaibatsu--literally, financial cliques--that long dominated the Japanese economy. So much a part of the Japanese military establishment were the zaibatsu that the U.S. broke them up in 1945. But the trading company itself, under ambitious, soft-spoken President Tatsuzo Mizukami, 63, has once again made the ubiquitous "Mitsui man" synonymous with aggressive, no-nonsense enterprise.

Turning know-how and know-where to the advantage of its Japanese corporate clients, Mitsui & Co. scours the globe for new technological processes, untapped sources of raw materials and new sales markets. When deals are consummated, Mitsui usually conducts negotiations, then handles details ranging from warehousing to customs clearance to distribution. Mitsui has specialists in everything from bridges to buttons, handles over 5,000 different commodities through a global network of 90 offices in 55 countries. Says one company executive proudly: "We deal in everything but human beings."

In recent months Mitsui has set up the sale of Japanese hydroelectric turbines and pumps in Australia, contracted for a Tokyo-engineered ammonia and urea plant in Pakistan, negotiated with General Electric for construction of Japan's first demonstration power reactor. By acquiring the necessary patents, winning the interest of Japanese industrialists and arranging financing, Mitsui is almost entirely responsible for Japan's blooming petrochemical industry. In one of its biggest joint ventures to date, the trading company has arranged to deliver almost a billion dollars' worth of Australian iron ore to Japanese industry over the next 20 years. And through two dummy companies, Mitsui has established a trading toe hold in Red China.

A Working Tool. The largest share of the parent company's business is done with the U.S. through a ten-month-old subsidiary called Mitsui & Co. (U.S.A.), Inc., which, with headquarters in Manhattan's Pan Am Building and branches in eight other cities, handled some $420 million in trade during its first six months alone. For years, a significant chunk of Mitsui's business has come from "off shore trading" deals involving the U.S. and countries other than Japan. In one case, Mitsui shipped U.S. machinery to Brazil, which in turn sent coffee to Sweden, which for its part exported glassware to the U.S. Because Japanese trading companies are so well suited for such complicated transactions, the president of Mitsui, U.S.A., Sueyuki Wakasugi, predicts that they may well become "a working tool of America's international marketing."

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