植物性皮革生產商Project Pi：日本市場拓展策略研究

Abstract

植物性皮革生產商Project Pi：日本市場拓展策略研究

The Project Pi, a plant-based vegan leather supplier, starts with two missions: one is to reduce income inequality in Thailand and the other is to improve animal welfare and environmental preservation. To achieve this mission, our company is planning to enter Japanese market in 2021. Recently, a plant-based vegan leather market is growing in Japan as there is significant increase in vegan leather consumption while the animal leather consumption experiences significant decrease. Japanese consumers also have high awareness of animal welfare and environmental preservation when purchasing products. To enter Japanese market, the Project Pi selects to target footwear industry as it is one of the largest application by quantity of the vegan leather in Japan, particularly focusing on sports shoes and women’s shoe. We deliver plant-based vegan leather to our customers at competitive price, which enable them to produce high cost-to-performance products. We have material and non-woven textile technology, which makes our vegan leather rain-proof and abrasion resistive while preserving good breathing. These characteristics are key differentiators to animal leather and plastic-based vegan leather. To be the first-mover in vegan-leather shoe market in Japan, we choose export as it requires minimum investment and we target major shoe makers in Japan including ASICS, Mizuno and Diana. We will set up a local office to deal with customer needs in real time and connect them to our headquarter that mainly handle product development and exporting. Challenge is mainly come from competition with Pinatex, an UK-based plant-based vegan leather supplier. Pinatex has advantages that they are established brand with many collaborations with well-known brand such as H M and Hugo Boss. They also have put some effort in Japanese market recently reflecting from promotion events and utilization of its leather by several Japanese SMEs. The key to be successful in competition with Pinatex is low-cost production which enables more attractive price to customers. Our investments come from different sources such as owners’ fund and Thai government support grant. As of estimation, there will occur financial loss in the first year of market entry due to customer acquisition, but will turn profitable from second year. For future expansion, we would consider applications for automobile interior and bag.