Historic F1 Possibilities
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----Well, now I’d
finally like to turn our conversation to Ebbro’s embarking into 1/20 F1 plastic
model development. Fujimi’s announcement
of its Ferrari 126C commercialization at the Shizuoka Hobby Show in May ’07,
kicked off the recent 1/20 F1 models that have come out. So, what do you think of this musical chairs
game situation we’ve had with historic 1/20 F1 model commercialization in
recent years Kiya-san, I mean, this whoever’s-first-wins state it’s become?
Ummm.., of course I have various thought on
that, but I don’t really have anything to say about the individual products.
----But, you tried
everything in your Tamiya days, to get the Honda RA272 (sales date: Dec ’96)
and the Lotus 25 squeezed into the lineup, didn’t you? Having done all that and cut costs to the
limit to get them squeezed in, surely it must be pretty difficult sales wise
for historic cars as compared to recent machines?
Yeah.
But when you add everything up now, I don’t think it changes much you
know. Besides, even when you commercialize
current F1 machines, the first production lots are the only ones that sell
properly. I think we’re all in an “I don’t
think sales will get any better beyond next year” situation now.
But historic cars are already old from the
beginning, so I think that if you do them up properly, there’s no worry about
them slowly but surely continuing to sell.
Thankfully our first Lotus 72E production lot sold out completely, and
that’s a good example… From the
beginning, I’d always firmly believed that when commercializing older cars.
----Yeah, it’s
okay to firmly believe that, but in actual fact, didn’t you really feel that “You
can’t do business with historic cars” when you were a Tamiya employee?
No, not necessarily. “There’s definitely a business opportunity there”
was my thinking.
----Um, but
when I talked with various model manufacturers back then about my “Let’s
commercialize the Lotus 79!” proposition, they kept telling me “Well.., historics
won’t sell…”
Yeah, but that’s the crux of it, isn’t it… For example if you’re thinking short-term,
you’re only saying like “If we invest 10-million this year, we can have
20-million in profit on 30-million in sales”.
But for us it’s like saying “If we invest 10-million, we can have
10-million in sales this year. And from
next year out to the 6th year, we’ll have about 5-million in sales every year,
for a total of 35-million in sales. Which do you think it better?” That’s what I think the business model is all
about with historic cars. That’s why I
was able to do those commercializations in my Tamiya years, and if I hadn’t
been thinking that way, I would never have gotten those projects through in the
midst of all the opposition.
And, in fact you get yearly sales data, don’t
you? When I saw those data at Tamiya, I
knew “Oh, they (the calculations I was aiming for in the beginning) are going
to fall into place in the end”. And I
had known that a way to commercialize them would open up, if someone could just
see that. It’s been like that with
staple products in the resin kit world, and with Fujimi I thought “There must
be someone who knows how to do the business model calculations there”.
----So for
Ebbro, it’s not like you’ve just been riding on the recent craze for 1/20
historic F1 cars these days.
That’s right. We were developing our diecast 1/20 Honda F1
series at the time, and I’d been thinking ahead to what I wanted to be doing
after commercializing all those, and just as I thought “Plastic models would be
more interesting than diecast after all” a fortuitous set of circumstances
overlapped. Whenever I went overseas on
an errand, I’d been taking every chance I got to capture photos of actual cars
on film at Classic Team Lotus and in museums.
Because, well, to be honest, after I’d
commercialized the RA272 at Taimya, I wanted to continue with a series of the other
earliest Honda F1 cars. But soon I’d
quit the company, and had this “How to continue with the projects of my Tamiya
days” conflict within me, and thought “Then I’ll just commercialize them in
diecast” and started commercialization of the earliest Honda F1 cars in diecast
1/20. And, once that commercialization
had settled in, I was thinking “Could I get back into the world of plastic
models?” when I met Clive Chapman (see page 37 [not shown]), and when I
explained my feelings to Clive, he said “Why not commercialize some of our team’s
machines?”