Tim Clark has a great new piece up on JER about how an American is starting to change how bills are collected in Japan. The short story is that either lawyers or the mafia collect bills in Japan, and the lawyers are too busy lawyering to collect bills, so an American has found a way to do it and the market size is $800 billion ?!?!?
“Japanese firms have accounts receivables of 90 trillion yen–more than
U.S. $800 billion–for ordinary commercial transactions. And that’s all
completely separate from the loan sector,” he says. “There’s room in the
market for at least another 500 agencies like ours.” The typical fee for
a successful collection is 35 percent; assuming that five percent of
outstanding bills become delinquent and 40 percent of those are
collectible, that’s an untapped market worth more than U.S. $16 billion.
Japan Entrepreneur Report No. 17 March 2004
[japanentrepreneur.com]