Business partnership with Aprica Kassai Inc. : Sojitz Corporation

The retail business division of Sojitz Corporation acts as a general agent in the Japanese market for the sale of products from Aprica Kassai Inc. (headquartered in Osaka), a leading manufacturer of baby strollers, child seats and other child care items.

Its partnership with Aprica Kassai goes back to the early 1970s, when Aprica made a transition from the wholesale business to manufacturing and commenced production of strollers based on technology imported from Italy. The partnership, therefore, has lasted more than 30 years.

The intervening period saw many changes, including changes in domestic logistics, intensifying competition with rival companies and the yen’s appreciation against the dollar, adversely affecting their sales overseas.
However, the recent amendment of the Road Traffic Act, for example, enforcing the mandatory use of child seats, has prompted an expansion of sales of the Aprica brand.
Sales of Aprica products are no longer confined to the Japanese market. On Sojitz’s initiative, they have made their way into the European market during the last couple of years and are now even sold at Harrods, the world-famous department store in London.

In the future, Sojitz is aiming at a full-fledged sales promotion in the rapidly growing Chinese market and is committed to ongoing efforts to raise the value of the Aprica brand through a strategic build-up in close collaboration with Aprica Kassai Inc.
With the falling birthrate posing an increasingly serious problem in Japan, the amount of money spent per child is rising. Aprica Kassai has always advocated tender care in raising children, noting that the type of treatment they receive as infants and toddlers (from birth to age 3) has a profound bearing on the rest of their life.
With the clear objective of helping to make babies happier these high value added products, developed and designed by sound medical approaches, will be increasingly accepted in the child-care goods market in Japan and elsewhere.