While President Tokematch is on the international wanted list… “What’s inside the 55 billion yen-a-year company” that is driving the highly successful luxury watch business.
More and more people are treating luxury watches as assets, buying and selling them. Then, an incident occurred. Neoreverse, the company operating the luxury watch sharing service “Tokematch,” sold luxury watches entrusted to it by their owners without permission, and on January 31 announced the termination of the service and the dissolution of the operating company.
The service “Tokematch” rents luxury watches such as Rolex entrusted by their owners and pays a portion of the proceeds to the owners. The number of watches damaged was 140, and the amount of damage was at least 240 million yen (as of March 12). The number of unreturned watches is said to be 900, amounting to 1.9 billion yen in total. The total amount of unreturned payments is said to be as much as 1.9 billion yen.
On March 28, an international warrant was issued for the arrest of Keiji Fukuhara, 42, a former representative of the company, and Daisuke Nagata, 38, a former employee of the company, who are believed to have left the country for Dubai (UAE) upon the dissolution of the management company.
They have already been ordered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to return their passports, and if they do not do so by April 12, their passports will be revoked and they may be considered to be in Japan illegally.
FRIDAY DIGITAL” has covered the case again and again. In that article, Toru Yoshiyama, president of Yohkichi Group Inc., a company specializing in the purchase of luxury watches with annual sales of 55 billion yen, spoke about the problem of private sales of used luxury watches. With the free sale and purchase of high-value items now available on sites such as Mercari and other flea market apps and websites,
“We expect to see more and more problems like this in the future,” he said.
He said. He also warned that “we will see more and more problems like this in the future.
We urge everyone to look at the company’s information. The registered address is in a large, trustworthy building, the company has the required number of employees, not a rental office, and I would like you to do a Google search to see if the company has actual operations, a megabank as a client bank, a legal advisor, or a labor attorney, and properly check the actual status of the operations.
Also, we would like you to carefully determine the value of the company as a corporation since we are requesting a high-value watch, including its evaluation by a proven credit research company such as Teikoku Databank, its sales track record, and its capitalization of at least several tens of millions of yen, etc.”
What is needed, he said, is the value of building a “relationship of trust.” So how exactly did “Yokichi” run by Mr. Yoshiyama earn such trust? To find out, we paid a visit to the company.
The entrance is a bleak steel door, but once you step inside, you can see the ……
Yohkichi is located in a beautiful glass-walled building in Higashi Azabu (Minato-ku). In the middle of a plain corridor, there is a white iron door. Next to the door is a company plate that reads “Yohkichi” and an auto-locking system. It is hard to believe that this is the entrance to a company that boasts annual sales of 55 billion yen.
However, as soon as the iron door was opened, the view changed completely. The entire entrance of the company is mirrored, and in front of it stands a huge black door that looks like a bank robber in a foreign movie. The atmosphere is, to be honest, quite eerie. Then, when you open the door and go inside, you will see a bright and spacious space with white as its base color, which is completely different from the atmosphere of the entrance. ……
There is an open space with glass walls all around, and a tense atmosphere like a pharmaceutical company’s lab (laboratory) is in the air. On the table were lined up a number of ultra-luxury watches, which exceeded 5 million yen in value and which could not be seen even in a specialty store. The total value of the watches was said to exceed 500 million yen. However, the owner said, “By tomorrow, there will be almost nothing left of this place,
By tomorrow, most of them will be gone,” said Mr. Yoshiyama with a smile.
Mr. Yoshiyama said with a smile. What does that mean?
All the watches here were purchased yesterday, inspected today, and shipped to buyers all over the world via a trading company. So we don’t need a big safe, and the watches are here for only one day. Another 300 million yen worth of watches arrives on another flight today, and we inspect them and ship them tomorrow. We repeat this process every day.”
The luxury watch market is sure to become more and more active.
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PHOTO： Shinya Nishizaki
