A trading company that works in three languages, from one office

Vietnam has become a serious manufacturing and consumer market, and a great deal of trade now passes through it. What has not caught up is the ability of a company abroad to actually reach into it: to know which supplier is real, to get a specification understood, to find out what a regulator will require before shipping rather than after.

Sunsho Trade was set up in Ho Chi Minh City to be that reach. The company is registered in Vietnam and managed by a Japanese owner who lives here, and the team works in English, Japanese and Vietnamese. That combination is the whole point: a drawing written in English reaches the factory floor in Vietnamese, and the factory’s question comes back to you in English.

The same position works for Japan. Because our management is Japanese, we can carry a Vietnamese product into a conversation with a Japanese buyer in Japanese and on Japanese terms, and we can source Japanese equipment, materials and products and deliver them to Vietnam or wherever the buyer is.

So we work in four directions: selling into Vietnam, sourcing from Vietnam, selling into Japan and sourcing from Japan. One client is buying castings or moulded parts from a Vietnamese factory; another is taking a Vietnamese food product to Japanese buyers; another is bringing a Japanese machine into a plant in Vietnam. All of them need the same underlying knowledge — customs, certification, labelling, and who is genuinely reliable — so we run all four rather than pretending to specialise in one.