USS Auction House
Not only does USS operate the largest number of auction locations (kaijo in Japanese), but also this auction house also is responsible for the largest used car auction in Japan – USS Tokyo – where cars in up to 10 lanes are auctioned simultaneously throughout the day on Thursdays.
The first USS auction was a humble affair with just 255 vehicles being auctioned. The key to USS’s very strong growth from here to a dominating position of 33.7% share of the auto auction market has been its aggressive deployment of information technology solutions pioneering the widespread introduction of electronic and remote bidding. The advent of the Internet has accelerated this and the other auction houses struggled to keep up.
Only some of the over 120 auction locations we buy from are USS auctions, but the USS group is by far the biggest player in the industry. In 2008, the USS group sold more than 2.9 million vehicles. Now, to put that in perspective, that is an average of 58,000 per week. Yes, you read that right – per week Or how about this for another way of looking at it: Japan exports about 1 million used cars every year. That’s only about 1/3 of the number of vehicles passing through the USS auctions. That’s how big this company is.
(And, in case you are wondering what “USS” stands for, it has nothing to do with the US navy or Star Trek. It actually is an acronym of “Used car System Solutions”.)
