Bridgestone Corporation

Bridgestone operates the world's largest tire distribution network, a biological parallel to mycorrhizal fungal networks that connect forest ecosystems. With $28.9 billion in revenue (2024) and manufacturing presence across 24 countries, the company demonstrates how resource allocation through optimized networks generates competitive advantage through Murray's Law: minimal energy expenditure for maximum distribution efficiency.

The company holds 14.2% global market share, ranking second to Michelin (15.1%), but leads in North America with $12 billion in regional revenue. This geographic concentration mirrors source-sink dynamics: strong markets (sources) subsidize expansion into emerging territories (sinks). Bridgestone employs 34,300 people in the U.S. alone, operating 2,200 company-owned retail stores that function as terminal nodes in a hub-and-spoke network.

Bridgestone's 2025 strategy targets 70% premium tire sales by 2026, demonstrating resource reallocation under constraint. Larger tire sales grew 110% in 2024 versus 2023, capturing higher margins as commodity tire competition intensifies. This mirrors adaptive radiation: occupy profitable niches competitors cannot efficiently serve. The closure of the LaVergne, Tennessee plant (July 2025) represents controlled branch pruning—eliminating low-margin commodity production to concentrate resources on premium segments.

The company's scale generates Kleiber's Law efficiencies: revenue grows faster than operational costs due to shared R&D, centralized procurement, and distribution network density. Where smaller competitors must build complete manufacturing-to-retail infrastructure, Bridgestone amortizes fixed costs across 4.43 trillion yen in production volume. The organism survives not through superior product biology, but through network topology that smaller rivals cannot replicate without prohibitive capital investment.