Photo: Jigneshhn / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
Nationality: Japanese
Born: February 7, 1949
Age: 71 years
Born Place: Ube, Yamaguchi, Japan
Gender: Male
Spouse: Teruyo Nagaoka
Known for: Founder of Fast Retailing, parent company of Uniqlo
Net Worth: US$24.3 billion (May 2020)
BIOGRAPHY
Tadashi Yanai (柳井 正, Yanai Tadashi, born 7 February 1949) is a Japanese billionaire businessman, the founder and president of Fast Retailing, the parent company of Uniqlo (“unique clothing”). As of May 2020, he was ranked 41st richest in the world by Forbes, and the richest in Japan, with an estimated net worth of US$24.3 billion.
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
Yanai was born in Ube, Yamaguchi in February 1949. He attended Ube High School and later Waseda University, graduating in 1971 with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Political Science. His uncle was an activist for elimination of the settlement of discriminated lower-class people, called Burakumin (minority group of Japanese society).
CAREER
In 1971, Yanai started in business by selling kitchenware and men’s clothing at a JUSCO supermarket. After a year at JUSCO, he quit and joined his father’s roadside tailor shop. Yanai opened his first Uniqlo store in Hiroshima in 1984, and changed the name of his father’s company Ogori Shoji to Fast Retailing in 1991. He has stated: “I might look successful but I’ve made many mistakes. People take their failures too seriously. You have to be positive and believe you will find success next time.”
Tadashi Yanai is stepping down from the board of Softbank after 18 years as an independent director at the Japanese technology conglomerate.
AWARDS AND HONOURS
- Yanai won the International Retailer of Year award for 2010 from the National Retail Federation in the US. He was the fourth Japanese national to win it, and the first since 1998, when it was won by Masatoshi Ito, owner and honorary chairman of the Ito-Yokado retailing group. He was also chosen as best company president in a survey of Japanese corporate executives by Sanno Institute of Management in 2008 and 2009.
- In 2012 he was included in the 50 Most Influential list of Bloomberg Markets Magazine.
PERSONAL LIFE
He is the son of Kanichi Yanai and Hisako Mori Yanai. Yanai is married and has two sons, Kazumi and Koji, and lives in Tokyo. He lives in a $50 million,16,586-square-foot house outside of Tokyo and owns two golf courses in Hawaii.
The contents of this page are sourced from Wikipedia article on 4 July 2020. The contents are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
