Our Sales Network

Selling Life Science Products in Japan

Technology has made the world a much smaller place, and it often seems that most of the advanced countries are becoming more alike than they are different. However, there are still certain unique characteristics of the Japanese life sciences marketplace that are quite different from how things are done in North America or Europe. One of the unique features of the Japanese marketplace is a primary distributor’s use of a network of sub-distributors to sell products to end users. Although this system is employed by all of the major Japanese distributors of life science products, European and North American suppliers can sometimes misunderstand it or perceive it as an optional and unnecessary additional layer between themselves and the end users. Therefore, we have taken a bit of time to briefly explain the sub-distributor network system below.