Winning Trade

Japan now exports U.S. grain

American automobile and consumer electronics companies have taken their lumps from Japanese competitors in recent years, and now it may be the turn of U.S. grain exporters. Since 1978 such gigantic Japanese trading houses as Mitsui & Co. (1981 sales: $70.8 billion), and Mitsubishi Corp. (1981 sales: $70.3 billion), have quietly bought some two dozen U.S. grain elevators to store crops for export, and now handle an estimated 10% of all American grain sales abroad.

The Japanese have grabbed this business away from traditional exporters like Cargill Inc. and Continental Grain Co. by using the high-volume, low-profit tactics that have made Japanese companies feared and formidable competitors in markets everywhere. Mitsui and Mitsubishi deny that they go further and deliberately incur losses, but U.S. traders insist that the companies in some cases do just that to expand their share of the market for American grain.

Japanese merchants have had a toehold on the U.S. gram trade since the 1950s, when they first set up export offices in West Coast port cities like San Francisco and Seattle to buy foodstuffs for Japan. The island nation of 116 million people is a principal grain importer and now buys some $6 billion a year from the U.S., its biggest supplier. In 1973, after a grain shortage squeezed the worldwide market for soybeans, a major Japanese grain import from the U.S., the anxious Japanese traders began moving inland to buy directly from farmers in an effort to secure a reliable source of supply.

Mitsui, whose U.S. grain trading units include Gulf Coast Grain, Inc. and United Grain Co., Inc., accelerated its drive into the U.S. market in 1978, buying eight grain elevators in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and Tennessee for $10.5 million from financially ailing Cook Industries. Mitsui beat out seven competitors by agreeing to the deal in just 48 hours. A year later Mi-tsui's archrival, Mitsubishi's Agrex Inc., boosted its own U.S. grain-trade investment by buying out Koppel Inc., the company's American partner, thereby becoming sole owner of a giant export elevator in Long Beach, Calif., along with elevators in Salina, Kans., and Enola, Neb. Other Japanese firms with U.S. grain-handling interests include Zen-Noh, a cooperative that is building an $88 million terminal outside New Orleans.

U.S. farmers, who have watched grain prices fall sharply because of the recession and an overabundance of commodities, are generally delighted by the influx of Japanese. Nebraska Wheat Grower Jake Sims figures that they have helped add three cents to four cents a bushel to the value of his crop, which currently is worth about $3.70 a bushel. Says he: "I don't care if it's Japanese, or Swedes, or whoever coming in. More competition means a better price, and we can use all the help we can get these days."

Grain companies are naturally less enthusiastic. Says Walter B. Saunders, executive vice president of Cargill: "I can't say we truly welcome more competition, but it does keep us on our toes." In reality, U.S. exporters have little to complain about. Foreign investment in the export of American-grown crops is a well-established tradition. Indeed, among four of the largest merchants of American grain, only Cargill is entirely homegrown. Of the rest, Louis Dreyfus is French-owned, Bunge Corp. has Dutch and Argentine roots, and Continental, now an American company, was originally founded in Belgium.

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