The Sogo Shosha: From Meiji to Buffett
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Book Overview
Few companies are as powerful, or as misunderstood, as Japan's sogo shosha. Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Itochu, Sumitomo and Marubeni trade oil and grain, own mines and convenience stores, finance power plants and hold stakes in thousands of businesses. For half a century, observers predicted their decline. Instead, they reinvented themselves, and in 2020 Warren Buffett made them one of Berkshire Hathaway's largest bets.
In The Sogo Shosha, economist Dr Gil Feiler traces these companies from the Meiji era to the age of Buffett, alongside Korea's chaebol and India's great business houses. He reveals what the classic studies left out: the politics, the corruption, the missing women and the workers below the pyramid. And he follows a decade of upheaval, from shareholder reform and succession wars to sanctions, artificial intelligence and the 2026 war in the Gulf.
The result is an authoritative account of institutions that did not decline, but mutated.
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