Happy company: Yahoo!

Happy company: Yahoo!

Image: Associated Press

Yahoo is probably the most successful Western company in Japan. Yahoo! Japan is the biggest online portal in the country, and way ahead of Google in marketshare. Yahoo! also owns an extremely valuable stake in Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba. In fact most of Yahoo's value is in its Asian assets today.
Yahoo's Japanese success is a lesson for other US companies: in each case, it went in with a local partner, Alibaba in China and Softbank in Japan. It approached those markets with humility instead of thinking what worked in the US was necessarily going to work in Asia.
Maybe for once companies like Google and Facebook can learn something from Yahoo and not the other way around.