By Viktor Yoshimura – 3rd of September 2026
The Circularity Brief — independent intelligence on IT asset disposition and the circular economy, Asia-Pacific & Japan.
Two Itochu announcements in one month mostly got read as two separate deals. Read together, they’re something else, and the interesting part isn’t the deals. It’s the structure.
Here’s what happened.
In March 2026, Itochu launched ERI Japan, a 50-50 recycling joint venture with the US electronics recycler ERI, formed through Itochu’s subsidiary Belong, alongside a minority investment in ERI itself. It was ERI’s first owned, branded operation anywhere outside the United States, and it landed in Tokyo.
In April 2026, Itochu brought in GET-IT, a Tokyo firm doing refurbished IT and third-party maintenance, as an equity-method associate.
Add Belong, Itochu’s existing, wholly-owned used-device business, and three pieces suddenly line up along a single corporate IT lifecycle:
Reuse (Belong) → enterprise refurbishment and maintenance (GET-IT) → data destruction and material recovery (ERI Japan).
Itochu itself describes these within a broader “IT equipment lifecycle.” That’s the announced part. It’s accurate, and it’s the version most coverage stopped at.
The structure is the story
The obvious reading is “Itochu is building a vertically integrated ITAD company.” I don’t think that’s right, and being precise about why is where this gets interesting.
Look at the ownership, because the three positions are deliberately not equivalent:
- Belong is wholly owned.
- GET-IT is an equity-method associate.
- ERI Japan is a 50-50 joint venture.
Those are three different levels of control, chosen for three different layers of the stack. That’s not what an integrator does when it sets out to own and operate one end-to-end business. It’s what a trading house does when it wants calibrated exposure across a value chain: full control where the position is core (reuse), influence where the capability is specialised and better left with its operators (refurbishment), and shared risk on the capital-intensive, technology-heavy processing end (recycling, where ERI brings the plant and the know-how).
So I wouldn’t call this a vertically integrated ITAD company. I’d call it something more deliberate: a stake across the IT lifecycle.
That distinction matters, because it tells you what Itochu is actually optimising for, not operational ownership of every step, but a position at every step, with the capital structure matched to how much of each step it wants to carry.
The quietest piece is the most strategically important
Of the three, GET-IT drew the least attention. However I think it’s the one to watch.
GET-IT doesn’t just resell hardware. It inspects, erases, tests, refurbishes and maintains enterprise servers, storage and networking across vendors, and across generations. And having run that kind of test-and-refurbish operation myself, I can tell you that capability is harder to build and harder to replace than any shredder on the recycling end.
Here’s why it matters more over time, not less. As hardware densifies, AI racks, GPU servers, high-value storage, the residual value in a retired fleet moves out of the metal and into the components. A megawatt of modern capacity retires at a fraction of the old fleet’s weight but with far more value packed inside. In that world, the scarce, value-capturing capability isn’t the ability to process tonnage. It’s the ability to inspect, test, grade and bring enterprise hardware back into productive use. That’s the test bench, not the truck bay, and GET-IT is the test-bench position.
The value cascade, and why the order is deliberate
There’s a hierarchy hiding in the lifecycle map, and Itochu now holds a rung at each level of it:
- Reuse sits at the top, the highest value retained, the least processing, the most avoided emissions. (Belong)
- Refurbishment and maintenance sit just below, capturing value from hardware that needs work before it can go back into service. (GET-IT)
- Material recovery sits at the bottom, the outlet for equipment with no viable reuse path, where value is recovered from the materials themselves. (ERI Japan)
Read from the bottom up, material recovery is the backstop. Read from the top down, the whole point is to keep as much hardware as possible from ever reaching it. A position at every rung lets you route each asset to the highest-value outlet it qualifies for, which is exactly what circularity is all about.
The pattern behind the pattern
Step back, and this connects to a bigger question I keep coming back to: how does a Western player actually enter the Japanese ITAD market?
The instinct is to build. It’s the wrong instinct here. ERI didn’t greenfield a plant in Tokyo, it came in through a trading-house joint venture. And that’s the template, because in Japan the things you can’t build fast are the things that matter: market access, the domestic licensing, and the client relationships that predate any newcomer by decades. A 商社 partner supplies all three at once. Itochu’s role in ERI Japan isn’t just capital, it’s the door.
Which is why one deal is noise and three deals are a strategy. Belong, GET-IT and ERI Japan together suggest Itochu isn’t making an opportunistic bet on recycling. It’s assembling an end-to-end circular-IT position in Japan, one calibrated stake at a time.
Two caveats
I’d label the inference clearly, because it’s a read of the structure, not a stated plan. Itochu has not declared “we are building an integrated circular-IT champion.” That’s my interpretation of where these three deals point.
And a second, operational caveat that anyone who’s run this work will recognise: owning the pieces is one thing; making them work together is another. A portfolio of stakes across a lifecycle is not the same as an operating machine that routes an asset cleanly from reuse to refurbishment to recovery. Integration, the actual hard part, happens after the announcements, and it doesn’t always happen. The shape is worth watching precisely because the execution is unproven.
Where this leaves things
The last cycle’s question in this industry was: who can recover the most material? The emerging one may be: who can keep the most value in circulation before anything gets recycled at all? Itochu, whether by design or by accretion, has built a position that’s aimed at the second question rather than the first.
That’s my read of it. If you’re watching capital move through the circular-IT space, is this the shape of how the majors will actually build these positions in Japan, trading-house stake by trading-house stake? Or am I reading a strategy into what’s really three separate, opportunistic deals? Tell me where you land.
Facts: ERI–Itochu JV announced March 2026 (via Belong); GET-IT equity-method association April 2026; Belong is Itochu’s wholly-owned used-device business. Ownership structures and dates should be confirmed against Itochu IR disclosures before republication.