Service retailers need to develop more and more stores to make their business grow, and so, many firms attempt to expand their stores nationally by aiming for the numerical target such as 1,000 stores within five years and so on. In practical fields, however, firms seem to find it hard to plan the concrete method to achieve the target and they seem to develop stores with rootless feeling. The reason for that is relatively little has so far been known regarding how firms should expand their geographic markets according to their growth stage with keeping good financial results. The purpose of this study is both to classify store development methods of service retailers in a domestic market and to clarify the relationship between growth methods and the corporate performance by analyzing sixteen Japanese school and education firms listed in Japan. Main result is profitability is the lowest in firms which expand their store networks into multiple areas without forming area dominant, while profitability is the highest in firms which expand and disperse the total number of stores nationally.

• Taku Kato(Kyorin University)