Top Message
A Greeting from Our President & COO
Driving “To Innovate Business Procurement Network” with Challenge and Respect
Thank you very much for your continued patronage and support.
MonotaRO was founded in Osaka in October 2000 with the aspiration of “To Innovate Business Procurement Network.” For business customers, the procurement of indirect materials is a time‑consuming process. By utilizing Internet technology, we have built an innovative e‑commerce business that enables customers to immediately check transparent prices and delivery dates without quotations and to make purchases directly online, and this business has continued to grow ever since.
Our goal is to provide many business customers with the experience of “making their work more efficient,” and to ensure that the additional time created as a result leads to the development of their businesses, such as improving productivity, developing new technologies, and creating new businesses. By using our services to help address the challenges of “labor shortages” and “insufficient time to focus on core operations” in industry, we seek to drive a transformation that will increase the value of time for our customers. We believe that our social mission is to act so that such transformations spread and, through this chain of change, contribute to the advancement of industry as a whole.
Our code of conduct places the greatest importance on “respect for others,” and under this culture we have fostered an environment in which each employee can proactively take on challenges. Recognizing and valuing each other’s diverse personalities and capabilities increases the drive to embrace new challenges and leads to the creation of new ideas and innovations. Going forward, we will continue to work together as one team to realize our aspiration 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