Opportunity Knocks

In spite of the impression you are getting from reading the newspaper or watching the evening news, there are quite a few healthy companies in Japan: organizations -- often with only a few dozen or hundred employees -- that learned the principals of good business and never forgot them. They didn't blow their money on golf memberships, race horses, or bar hostesses. They saw the Bubble Economy for what it was, and chose to resist the temptation that led to disaster for so many. They survived because they were conservative and practical. Unfortunately their traditional financing sources were not as wise. All of this is nothing new to anyone who follows the goings-on here in Japan. Foreign financial institutions are becoming increasingly active here in all sorts of areas. Yet there is one sector of financial services that is not being exploited to the extent possible by foreign corporations: equipment leasing.

Most Japanese leasing companies made the same mistakes as Japanese banks. All they cared about was whether or not a customer had real estate to be held as collateral or that there was someone to guarantee the payment contract would be honored. Few inquiries were ever made into the health of a business or its long-term prospects. Door-to-door fax and copier salesman were famous during the Bubble for aggressively courting sleazy companies.

Well, a lot of these respectable businesses are in need of new leases on new equipment. Not just office basics like copiers and fax machines, but bigger ticket items, especially computer and telecommunications systems. More often than you would think, smaller companies in very good financial shape are finding it difficult, in some cases impossible, to get new lease contracts or renew old ones. Burdened with so many customers who went belly up, many leasing companies are now only doing business with the biggest companies they can latch on to. The thinking apparently being that the bigger they are the less likely they are to fall.

This policy has not only made things worse for the smaller companies that make up the backbone of the Japanese economy, but it has presented an opportunity to foreign firms in this business who are looking to get into the Japanese market. Apparently there is a lot of money to be made in equipment leasing in Japan at the moment. Forget all the nonsense you've heard about Japanese only wanting to deal with Japanese. When it comes to survival, anyone will deal with anybody. If you or your company is experienced in medium to smaller scale leases, check out this market now.

It should be noted that the market for the leasing of aircraft, ships, and the like is already pretty crowded. If you can make money with the smaller stuff, you can make a lot of money, period.

HINT: The Y2K problem has many folks shopping for entirely new computer systems. Dawn of a new age... maybe

Like a growing number of people, I spent much of my time this past summer switching over to what many hope will be the salvation of software innovation: Linux.

No one likes to admit it, but a hard disk crash can be a rather cleansing experience. A lot of junk one thought was important turns out not to be. When this happened to yours truly very recently, I took the opportunity to load the Red Hat 5.1 distribution of Linux on my Pentium Pro 200MHz.

It, and I, have never been happier. This month's column was written on WordPerfect 7.0 running under Linux. I'm a convert. As of now, I have no intention of going back to Windows anything. For the first time in years I can, with certainty, be sure of what my PC is doing.

As a Unix clone, Linux is very, very difficult for most people to use (if you couldn't figure out MS-DOS, forget it). There are not as many commercial Linux applications out there, so those of you who need Bugs Bunny screensavers might be disappointed. However, it is getting easier to install and run with every release. It is a robust operating system with several GUI interfaces to choose from. The source code is freely available to anyone wishing to write applications for it, and the legion of programmers is increasing. Although the folks in Redmond may not like the fact, Linux is growing in popularity worldwide.

Check out http://www.linux.org for more information. After all, if yours truly can get it to workɍ

Tom is a freelance journalist based in Tokyo. You can share your Linux experiences with him at caldwell@gol.com.

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