From bankrupt fishmonger to dollar-store billionaire

(July 4): Selling everyday items to bargain hunters has made the founder of Japan’s biggest discount store a billionaire.

Hirotake Yano, founder and president of closely held Daiso Sangyo Corp., the self-described “Japanese shopping wonderland,” was one of the country’s first vendors to adopt a single-price model and used that strategy to build a net worth that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index values at US$1.9 billion ($2.6 billion).

“His timing was perfect,” Pascal Martin, a partner at OC&C Strategy Consultants, said in an email. “Opening the first 100-yen store in 1991, a couple of years after the burst of the Japanese economic ‘bubble,’ which was the beginning of a profound shift in Japanese consumer culture.”

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