‘Don Quixote’, a general discount store that is considered an essential course for traveling to Japan. It is a general store that sells a wide variety of products at low prices to the extent that those who have been there say, “There is nothing that is not available.” Items are piled up like a mountain, so browsing the inside of the store itself is as enjoyable and fun as a treasure hunt.
There are many products with good cost-effectiveness, so Mom Cafe even has a so-called ‘Don Quixote shopping list’, which is ‘Top 10 items you’ll regret if you don’t buy them when you go on a trip to Japan’. With 604 stores across Japan, Don Quixote is popular not only with Korean tourists. YouTube is flooded with videos in foreign languages introducing Don Quixote as a shopping mecca for traveling in Japan.
As tourists flocked to ‘open their wallets’, Don Quijote’s performance also hit an all-time jackpot. Pan Pacific International Holdings ( PPIH ) , which operates Don Quijote, announced on the 16th that its operating profit for fiscal year 2023 (July 2022 to June 2023) was 105.3 billion yen (approximately 964.8 billion won), the highest since its foundation. This is the first time since the company’s founding in 1980 that operating profit has exceeded 100 billion yen.
Sales were also solid at 1,936.8 billion yen (approximately 17,744.1 billion won), up 5.8% from the previous year. The strong performance of the group was led by Don Quixote, the core business. This was attributable to a sharp increase in consumption by inbound travelers. In particular, sales from April to June this year were 38.3 billion yen, approaching 95% of sales from April to June 2019, which was before the corona, and in fact recovered to the level before the corona crisis.
The future performance of the company itself was also positive. Sales expected next year were in the 2 trillion yen range, up 6.5% from the previous year. The dividend will also be raised to 21 yen, 1 yen higher than the previous year. On the 17th, on the Japanese stock market on the 17th, PPIH stock price rose to 3099 yen during the day, hitting a record high (closed price is 2938 yen).
Some point out that the strong support of Korean tourists was behind Don Quixote’s good performance. This is because Korea is the number one country for tourists visiting Japan. The number of Korean tourists who visited Japan until July of this year was 3.75 million, accounting for 29% of the total number of tourists. It is 1.56 million more than second place Taiwan (2.19 million).
On the other hand, PPIH has increased its sales and profits for 34 consecutive years despite the extreme circumstances of the Japanese economy, the ‘lost 30 years’. It is also called a ‘phoenix company’ because it survived a long-term recession메이저사이트 by flexibly changing its business model.
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a retailer that survived in Japan, there was a movement to benchmark Don Quixote in Korea as well. In 2018, E-Mart opened ‘Pierro Shopping’, the ‘Korean version of Don Quixote’. It became a hot topic as a new concept store that goes beyond the common sense of the existing distribution industry with a B-level sensibility of ‘fun than shopping’, but closed after two years as the business continued to lose money.