A Japan expert with 30 years there notes a strange gap: consumers snap up the latest gadgets, but medical devices haven't evolved since the 1970s. Local manufacturers seem to avoid competing on innovation, leaving the door open for foreign companies to move in with better technology.
Chapters
One of the most interesting things I've noticed in my close to 30 years of doing business in the Japanese market is the people are very, very interested in high technology. And you'll see, like 20 years ago, people were watching television on their phones on the metro when nobody else in the world could do that. But the medical device market seems to be held up in time. It's very interesting. You'll see things that really look like they're from the '70s being used in hospitals today. Now my theory about that is that it's a lack of competition. Very often you'll have one or two Japanese manufacturers and they almost seem like they've come to some type of a gentleman's agreement and decided not to do any additional research and development. So they've, they've held the product at a relatively low technological level. You see that a lot with a lot of different products in healthcare, and I always find it amazing. Now what that means for you is if you can get a foothold, you can get people to look at your product even though it's a little bit different, you're very often going to offer something that has a great deal of a better feature set than what you're going to see existing in the Japanese market being sold by the Japanese. So if you're selling a pretty good, robust American, Israeli, British, Scandinavian device, German, you might find, but you're going to be able to really blow away the Japanese on your feature set if you can get in.
