Annals of Business Administrative Science
Online ISSN : 1347-4456
Print ISSN : 1347-4464
ISSN-L : 1347-4456
Emergent strategies for gas stations to survive in a carbon-neutral age
The challenge of Yamahiro
Nobuo Takahashi
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JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS

2022 Volume 21 Issue 2 Pages 15-29

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Abstract

The number of gas stations (GS) in Japan has halved in the last quarter-century, as price competition has made selling gasoline unprofitable. Further, the Japanese government has formulated a policy to end the sale of gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035. Under these circumstances, Yamahiro, a GS company, (A) according to non-oil services, divided its GSs into three groups, namely, car inspection/testing, car washing/coating, and car rental, and further increased the specialization of each station by focusing on the services it offers; (B) not reduced the number of employees at the station despite operating self-service GSs and introduced the vehicle identification system and vehicle information management system to improve the profitability of its non-oil services by linking these systems; (C) utilized the vehicle data to create synergies between the car-rental business and used car sales business; and (D) increased the number of GSs by taking over unprofitable stations from wholesale dealers of oil products and retraining their entire workforces. As a result, the company expanded its business in Tokyo area, presently earning 40% of its profits from non-oil services, and won the Japan Quality Award (JQA).

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© 2022 Nobuo Takahashi. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 International) license. The CC BY 4.0 license permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons [Attribution 4.0 International] license.
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