Top Message
A Greeting from Our President & COO
Try to achieve “To Innovate Business Procurement Network” with the power of challenge and respect
Thank you for your continuous support.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of MonotaRO, which was founded in Osaka in October 2000 with the aspiration of “To Innovate Business Procurement Network.” It is with the support of all of our business partners, customers, and stakeholders that we are able to celebrate our 25th year in business. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to you for your support.
We launched in 2000 and have continued to grow an innovative e-commerce business by utilizing Internet technology in the time-consuming procurement process of indirect materials, enabling users to immediately confirm transparent prices without quotations and delivery dates and to make purchases.
Currently, the number of registered accounts exceeds 10 million, with 1.04 million new customers started using our services in 2024. In addition, our customer base is expanding: more customers not only in small and medium-sized businesses but also in large corporations have registered with our service. We will continue to deepen our understanding of each customer's behavior and needs, enhance our competitive advantages in assortment, marketing, supply chain, operations, software, and data, and pursue high value-added services that only MonotaRO can provide.
Our goal is to provide many businesses with the experience of “getting work done,” and the resulting “usable time” will lead to business development for our clients, such as increased productivity, development of new technologies, and creation of new businesses. Our services improve the “labor shortage” and “lack of time to spend on core business” in the industry, and we create a revolution to “increase the value of time” for our clients. We believe that our social value is to take action with the aim of developing the industry as a whole through a chain of transformations.
The Code of Conduct that guides our actions places the greatest importance on respect for others. Based on this culture, we have established an environment where each and every employee can challenge herself/himself independently. By recognizing each other's diverse personalities and abilities, we will enhance the vitality to take on challenges, foster an environment that creates new ideas and innovation, and work as one to realize our mission of “To Innovate Business Procurement Network”.
Director, President, and COO Sakuya Tamura
Our Founding Aspirations
Work with respect for each other.
Test small changes quickly, and adapt based on the results of those changes.
Follow these principles, and MonotaRO will continue to grow.
The founding of a company includes a mission to society. The first mission is to provide new value to society. All industries have existing companies trying to optimize in their own environments. To enter and win there, a new company needs to bring new value which society demands, but which does not yet exist.
When I founded MonotaRO in 2000 with my colleagues and entered the indirect material market, I sensed that we could provide new value through transforming the complex distribution of the indirect material market by utilizing database marketing through the Internet. My colleagues, who also shared a commitment to this value, and I have changed the mechanism of indirect material procurement by constructing and providing a new and efficient purchase platform so that we can distribute sufficient indirect materials, without wasted time and effort, to all businesses nationwide in Japan.
However, the new value that we create must be continually subjected to scrutiny in order to evolve and develop further. If not, this would mark the end of our mission to society. The second most important mission, therefore, is that the company must continue to evolve in order to keep making contributions to society. In Japanese, "kaisha", the word for company, is written by reversing the characters for "shakai", the word for society. I wanted to realize a better society by creating a good company. If each person working at MonotaRO comes to think MonotaRO as a society in which he or she belongs, the evolution necessary for our existence can be incorporated into the system.
In order to accomplish that, first, we must work with respect for one another. We join society’s circle of trust when this mutual respect does not just stay limited inside of MonotaRO, but also expands to the world at large. I believe that Monotaro can continue to grow by consistently testing small changes and then evolve by adapting to the results of those changes.
Founder and Honorary Advisor Kinya Seto