Strategic Platform Business: Marubeni’s Recipe for Value Creation and Sustainable Growth

Marubeni may be one of Japan’s oldest companies, but its recent performance looks more like that of a high-growth start-up. Since February 2021, its share price has risen by 660%, culminating in a market capitalization of 10 trillion yen in February 2026, an exceptional trajectory in Japan’s resurgent equity market.

That momentum is not a break from Marubeni’s past but a continuation of it. Over 168 years, the company has continually reinvented itself, expanding across metals, chemicals, aerospace and energy to lifestyle, food and agriculture. In many ways, its evolution mirrors Japan’s transformation into a global economic powerhouse and reflects its ability to adapt to the demands of each new era.

Now, Marubeni is rolling out a strategy designed to turn the group into a more growth-oriented business and to match the performance of the world’s most dynamic corporations.

The company’s leadership says the shift begins with a change in the yardstick. Marubeni is benchmarking itself not only against trading house peers, but against leading global companies across industries. Rather than a standalone goal, it is a framework for enhancing corporate value, built on analyzing how leading companies create value and translating those lessons into action. 

In shaping GC2027, its Mid-term Management Strategy launched from FY2025, Marubeni also reviewed its own past success cases and extracted the factors behind what worked. Three common traits emerged. The first is growth domains, meaning markets where demand can rise sustainably. The second is high added value, meaning businesses that deliver products and services closely aligned with customer needs and trends. The third is scalability, meaning the ability to expand a core business into other regions and adjacent domains. 

Marubeni defines business units that embody all three pillars of its winning strategy as Strategic Platform Businesses.

“We will leverage the profit growth model we have cultivated throughout our history, and our insight into businesses that we consider to be "winning strategies," and will focus our human resources and investment capital on businesses with winning strategies.” says President and CEO Masayuki Omoto.

Representative examples of Strategic Platform businesses include Agri-inputs Retail, Mobility Business in North America, Wholesale and Retail Power Trading, Aviation Aftermarket and Asset Trading, Food Marketing and Manufacturing, and IT and Digital Solutions.

The combined power of Marubeni’s “winning strategies” can be seen in the agricultural input retail business centered on Helena in the US. Helena is a major player in the US agricultural input retail market, holding a market share of around 10%. Since Marubeni acquired Helena in 1987, the business has continued to grow steadily, expanding from about 100 locations at the time of acquisition to around 550 today. 

Helena illustrates the first element, growth domains. The US is one of the world’s largest crop producer by value, supported by strong domestic demand and export competitiveness. In this structurally resilient market, Helena has achieved revenue growth at a CAGR that outpaces overall crop production growth.

The second element is high added value. Beyond selling inputs, Helena has strengthened its capability to provide solutions that improve productivity and efficiency. Since the early 1990s, it has developed more than 500 products under the Helena Products Group, supported by its own research facilities, and tailored offerings designed around farmers’ soil and crop conditions. Helena is continuing to look for innovations that fit the future of a changing agriculture farming need.

A further source of added value is Helena’s digital agronomy platform, AGRIntelligence, which it has offered since the 2000s. By analyzing customers’ soil and crop data, the platform supports customized recommendations and optimal input plans. Because Helena has run this service for years, it has accumulated a large volume of data that helps it respond across a wide variety of situations. 

The third element is scalability. Alongside widening its geographic coverage within the US and expanding into adjacent services such as proprietary products, contract spraying and formulation, Marubeni has extended Helena’s model internationally.

In 2019, Marubeni acquired Adubos Real, an agri-inputs retailer in Brazil, a market with agricultural growth potential comparable to that of the US. By applying Helena’s expertise in digital agronomy, proprietary products and customer-focused solutions, Adubos Real is steadily expanding its sales territory and developing higher value-added services. In doing so, it demonstrates not only geographic scalability, but the replication of all three pillars of Marubeni’s winning strategy.

Like Helena, other Strategic Platform Businesses also embody the three winning strategies and are driving the company’s growth.

Under GC2027, Marubeni’s Mid-term Management Strategy initiated in 2025, the company is deploying significant new capital to Strategic Platform Businesses. The company plans to invest 1.2 trillion yen ($7.6 billion) in Strategic Platform Businesses over three years, out of a total of 1.7 trillion yen ($10.9 billion) in new investments. 

Marubeni says it will also sharpen portfolio discipline by sequentially recovering capital from businesses where growth is not expected and reallocating the freed-up funds to Strategic Platform Businesses. 

At the same time, the company is looking ahead to Forward-looking Investment in Future Pillars aimed at sustainable corporate value enhancement. Marubeni says it will develop new business domains that will contribute to profits after 2030 and strengthen efforts for projects in India and Africa, where significant economic growth is expected. It also plans to pursue investment projects that span multiple business domains. By allocating 100 billion yen ($641.7 million) to what it calls long-term “seed planting,” Marubeni aims to support durable, long-run growth. 

Since his appointment, President and CEO Masayuki Omoto has visited more than 100 sites around the world, underscoring his belief that transformation begins at the frontline. He has called on employees to move forward step by step with what must be done, engaging directly with teams and listening to local perspectives. At the same time, he continues to communicate the defined Winning Strategy (Strategic Platform Businesses) daily, ensuring that those on the ground understand both the direction of travel and their role in achieving it.

Management says it will continue to allocate resources to these winning strategies while strictly enforcing capital efficiency and investment discipline. 

Beyond that FY2027 milestone, Marubeni says it will keep benchmarking itself against leading global companies and will pursue value creation that goes beyond the conventional framework of a diversified conglomerate.