2025 Volume 4 Issue 2 Pages 77-89
This paper aims to systematically examine the concept of the “value chain strategy,” which has become a key term in discussing today's general trading companies (sōgō shōsha) . The value chain strategy serves as a practical guideline for the business model of 21st-century general trading companies, now evolving into integrated business enterprises. Its core idea lies in engaging not with individual business units in isolation, but with business flows that encompass upstream and downstream industrial linkages to a certain extent. This approach highlights the essential nature of business investment by general trading companies, distinguishing them from ordinary investment funds. While specific implementations may vary across companies-or even among cases within the same company-these differences should be seen as variations in form rather than in substance.
