Samsonite, an American luggage manufacturer, and retailer aims to win over local shoppers with a range of products that are designed, made and sourced in the country down to the handles made from Kobe leather. It is interested in gaining a foothold in the Asian market because the US-based company underlines the fact that it saw Asia becoming its largest market for the first time this year by publicly listing its shares in Hong Kong in June (Tsui, 2011). The luggage maker states that it had enjoyed a sharp rise in sales compared with last year because it started introducing more regional or country-specific products around the world. Japan accounted for 46 percent of luggage sales in Asia last year, but the country only made up 10 percent of Samsonite’s sales in the region hence becoming interested in gaining a foothold in the Asian market (Tsui, 2011).
Samsonite has taken different actions to indicate their serious interests in the Asian market. Its Hungarian factory would be tripled in size to produce the Cosmolite range of lightweight suitcase as the company was unwilling to hand over patented technologies and materials to manufactures in China, where intellectual property remained poorly protected (Tsui, 2011). It would also expand its factories in India and Japan; however, it will continue to outsource production. Samsonite also stated that it was bringing back some production in-house to safeguard its intellectual property. It has also taken the action of improving its sale in that, almost all of the bags will be sold in Japan while a few will be retained in Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Russia as niche products targeting wealthy shoppers. Samsonite has also developed aggressive marketing campaigns which should boost the sales. The previous attempts to enter the Japanese luggage market had been unsuccessful due to unsuccessful local joint venture which had a poor distribution network and offered products that Japanese buyers did not like.
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The features and production of the Japanese line are different from other internationally marketed Samsonite products due to a number of reasons. Japanese have long been known to be people for whom quality and attention to details matter the most. When it comes to manufacturing, they are no different. Japanese production lines tend to use high-quality materials which make their way into bag production nowadays. The leather is used throughout the Japanese production world. In the case of material usage, the leather materials used in Japan either domestically or imported are not only from cows but also include various leathers from alligators, pythons and even lizards (Perez, 2014) . Unlike the Samsonite products, the Japanese production creates bag production from satchels used by children heading to elementary schools in the country to create the products used by millions of businesspersons to transport back and forth papers, files, and even lunchboxes in the form of leather.
There has been enough information indicating the Samsonite’s efforts to gaining a foothold in the Asian market has been a success. The Samsonite chairman Tim Parker stated that they saw a satisfying growth last year driven by the performance from the Tumi and eBags businesses (Perez, 2014) . The Samsonite Asian sales have been boosted and driven by Tumi. The world's largest travel luggage company achieved global sales of US$3.49 billion, up 23.3 percent with Asian accounting for $1.19 billion of that. Samsonite Asian sales excluding the Tumi effects grew by a much more modest 4.8 percent while sales in Japan increased by 32 percent, or 12 percent excluding the Tumi business (Perez, 2014) . The chairm an Tim Parker also stated that he made strides in improving Tumi’s performance, and it resulted to accretive to earnings in its first full year (Mattioli, 2016) . He also stated that the company would continue to implement their multi-brand, multi-category and multi-channel strategy while leveraging their management structure and investment in marketing to major on the opportunities they would face.
References
Mattioli, D. (2016). Samsonite close to deal for luxury luggage maker Tumi. MarketWatch . Retrieved from https://www.marketwatch.com/story/samsonite-close-to-deal-for-luxury-luggage-maker-tumi-2016-03-02
Perez, B. (2014). Asia continued to drive samsonite luggage sales in third quarter. South China Morning Post . Retrieved from http://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/1631036/asia-continued-drive-samsonite-luggage-sales-third-quarter
Tsui, E. (2011). Samsonite makes local case in Japan. FT.Com , Retrieved from http://prx- herzing.lirn.net/login?qurl=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.proquest.com.prx- herzing.lirn.net%2Fdocview%2F885922652%3Faccountid%3D167104
