Uchikura & Co., LLC

The Railroad Company That Survived by Not Selling Train Tickets

 

Choshi Electric Railway is a small railroad company in Chiba, Japan. But what makes it remarkable is not its trains. It is how the company has survived.

 

The railway struggled financially for years. Instead of simply cutting costs or giving up, the company looked for completely different ways to make money.

 

One answer was food.

 

Its famous “nure-senbei,” or moist rice crackers, became so successful that they helped support the struggling railway. Later, the company introduced “Mazui-bo,” a snack whose name is a joke: “mazui” can mean “bad tasting,” but the company was really saying, “Our financial situation is bad.”

 

It also sold naming rights to its stations, turning station names into advertising opportunities.

 

Today, most of the company’s revenue comes from businesses other than running trains.

 

There is an important business lesson here.

 

Choshi Electric Railway stopped thinking, “We are a railroad company, so we must make money from trains.”

 

Instead, it asked a different question:

 

“How can we make enough money to keep the trains running?”

 

Sometimes survival begins when you stop defining your business by what you sell.