Shin Nagakura, managing director of Transcosmos Investments, was a founding member of the Japan-based industrial group’s corporate venturing office in California’s Silicon Valley. He has more than 15 years of experience in investments, business development, and sales and marketing in the US and Japan and said his brief was to “identify, analyse, recommend and execute possible investments and alliance deals which would have a strategic fit with Transcosmos Japan and its portfolio companies”.
Nagakura said: “2013 has been a great year for me and Transcosmos. There are the great deals which my team did in 2013. Our investment and business development focus right now is on the e-commerce sector in the US, Europe, China and the Association of South East Asian Nations.”
His hundreds of investments and joint ventures include Junglee (sold to Amazon), Multiply (acquired by Naspers), RealNetworks, mySimon (sold to Cnet), AskJeeves and Coremetrics (bought by IBM). He is currently on the board of Merlin Information Systems in the UK, Become and Pheedo.
Prior to Transcosmos, Nagakura served with Recruit Company. He graduated from Sophia University, Tokyo, with a bachelor’s degree in international studies in 1986.
Nagakura said Transcosmos’s deals in 2013 include PFSweb, an e-commerce end-to-end service company. a Nasdaq-listed company (PFSW). Nagakura said: “This is a very strategic deal for us, which could potentially be a gamechanger for Transcosmos.”
Its other deals included FineEX, a Shanghai-based e-commerce logistics company, and another due to be announced as we went to press.
What is the future of your sector?
Nagakura said: “E-commerce as a sector is growing fast and will do so over the next 10 or so years.”