Hello everyone. This is Takayuki Kondo. On 19th November, we had visitors from Guatemala. They visited our company for the first time. Do you know Guatemala? Guatemala is a republic located in the northern part of Central America. It shares a border with Mexico in the north and faces Caribbean ocean in the northeast and Pacific ocean in the south. Official language is Spanish, and population is 14 million.
The purpose of their visit was expanding supply sources for Japanese used engines. According to them, Japanese cars are quite popular in Guatemala. They told me that local market share of Japanese car was 85%, Korean car was 10%, and European car was 5%.
They used to purchase brand new engines from China giving priority to price. However, Chinese engines are bad quality even brand new engines. Thus, they currently choose Japanese used engines.
To my great joy, we received good feedbacks on our JRS from them. JRS is an abbreviation for Japan Reuse Standard. We conduct a test on all our used engines, visualize test results, and disclose engine performances to our customers. We will also propose our KRA system where customers can trace histories of engines. Even customers overseas can see engine histories by themselves online if they install the KRA system.
Price is of course important when purchasing used engines, but I reconfirmed the importance of two keywords, i.e. quality and security.
We, as the supplier side of used engines, need to listen to voices of customers and enhance the relationship of trust with them in order to have a better understanding about their end users. This visit reminded me that we needed to make sincere responses to customers’ voices and requests in order to enhance the relationship of trust with them.