Rudlin Consulting

Author: Pernille Rudlin

  • The annual ritual of picking a cross cultural calendar

    The annual ritual of picking a cross cultural calendar

    Sorting through the various calendars on sale or that were sent to me for promotional purposes I have ended up choosing the same ones as last year – a haiku and ukiyo-e wall calendar because I like to be reminded of the passing seasons, and a desk calendar that has Japanese and European public holidays on it, for practical reasons.

    This annual ritual of picking a calendar reminds me of when I was working at Mitsubishi Corporation in London.  We locally hired staff used to fight to grab the desk calendars from Japan left over from mail outs to customers.  They not only had photos of the beautiful artefacts from the Seikado Museum, but could be easily customised so that three months could be viewed at a time, vital for calculating shipping schedules between Japan and Europe.

    The publisher of the desk calendar that I chose also shows three months on one page, but I am thinking of suggesting that they further modify their calendar to make it useful to employees of Japanese companies in Europe, by including indicators of the key dates of the Japanese financial year.

    Over three quarters of the biggest Japanese companies in Europe run on an April 1st to March 31st financial year in their Japan headquarters.  The dates for reporting results and shareholders’ meetings in Japan are highly predictable and tend to be clustered by industry.  But the annual cycle of proposals and decision making that this sets up, and the midterm plan 3 year cycle that many Japanese companies also adhere to, are not widely understood in Europe.

    The majority of European companies run on a calendar year of January to December.  But even when the calendar year is used, the dates of when the results are announced or the Annual General Meeting is held vary from company to company by weeks and even months.

    European employees therefore need to be actively reminded of key meetings and decision deadlines in Japan headquarters as they do not instinctively know the rhythm of the April to March financial year and it often does not match the rhythms of the British business year.  In fact one British retailing company acquired a few years’ ago by a Japanese company found it very hard to comply with the Japanese HQ’s request that they submit all their year end accounts by December 31st (in other words the day their financial year ended), so that the Japan HQ could compile the consolidated accounts in time for Japan’s March 31st year end, because this coincided with the UK’s busiest time of year – the Christmas shopping period.

    The Japan HQ have in fact changed their financial year to January to December a couple of years’ ago, giving the need to be more global as the reason.  However, when I went back to their British subsidiary last week, and asked them if that helped relieve the pressure, they said they had not really noticed, as the increasingly global nature of their business means they were busy all year round!

    This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book  “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.

  • The European love of argument

    The European love of argument

    I was looking at my diaries from when I was 11 years’ old and living in Japan, and was amused to see that I had written in them that my burning ambition was to be a politician.  Quite a few of the people I knew at university have become politicians, so I suppose on reflection this was not an impossible dream for me.

    I then wondered why I did not try to realise this ambition. I think it is because I really don’t like confrontation and I take it too personally.   This might be rooted in my childhood in Japan – Japanese schools do not offer as many opportunities to debate as they do in the UK.  But I also spent my teenage years in British schools, where, like many schools in the UK and Europe, there were plenty of opportunities to become good at arguing, such as school debating societies and public speaking competitions.

    By the time I reached university, I preferred to watch rather than participate in debates.  I still enjoyed writing logical, reasoned essays, which are the core of a liberal arts education in Europe, but I did not want to become a journalist either.

    Journalism and politics in the UK are very “adversarial” – always insisting that there are two opposed sides to every story and trying to set up a confrontation or show who is to blame.  Journalists claim this is a necessary approach, to get to the truth.

    However, a common way that politicians and journalists try to dominate the other is by using what are known as “ad hominem” attacks – a Latin phrase which is used in English, meaning “to the man”.  In other words, they try to undermine the validity of the other person’s argument by attacking the personal characteristics of the opponent.

    This is not considered a good debating technique, as it is not actually addressing the facts or logic behind the viewpoint or idea being expressed.  People try to avoid this kind of technique in the workplace, as it would be seen as discriminatory.  Plenty of arguments do take place however, about the definitions, logic, theories, profitability and justifications behind taking various business decisions.

    This does not seem to work well with the traditional Japanese approach, which is more Confucian and “ascriptive”. It’s not seen as unfair to assume that someone is more likely to be right because they have a higher status.  To the European question of “why?” a Japanese person senses a personal attack and a questioning of authority.

    Surprisingly, the nation which is most famous for philosophical rhetoric – France – has an education system which, like Japan, discourages questioning of teachers and therefore of superiors in the workplace.  But then France is also famous for its strikes and bloody revolutions.  Perhaps this is why in many Northern European workplaces, debate is considered to be “healthy”.  Japanese managers in Europe need to be prepared to argue their case logically to ensure good employee relations.

    This article can be found in “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.

  • The story of Japanese companies in the UK continues to be the story of the UK economy overall in 2016

    The story of Japanese companies in the UK continues to be the story of the UK economy overall in 2016

    The number of people employed in the UK by the biggest Japanese companies in the UK rose by around 1% to 76,103 in 2016 – representing over half of the 140,000 or so the Japanese Embassy to the UK estimates are employed overall in the UK by Japanese companies.

    Just as 80% of the UK economy is services, so too with Japanese companies in the UK.  Although Nissan, Toyota and Honda attract most of the headlines thanks to Brexit – understandably as they represent around 15,000 of the 76,000 jobs – the vast majority of the rest are in the services sector.

    Even Sony has only one small factory left in the UK, making high end audio visual equipment and employing less than 100 people.  The rest of 3000 or so jobs are in Sony Interactive Entertainment, music and film & TV or in marketing.

    Fujitsu is still the biggest Japanese employer in the UK but the gap with Nissan at #2 is narrowing, as Fujitsu have reduced their headcount by over 15% in the past year or so.  Although Fujitsu is still seen as an IT & telecomms manufacturer in Japan, in the UK it is largely an IT services company.

    Trading company Itochu may be a surprise at #3, but this is largely due to its ownership of tyre fitting chain KwikFit.

    The Hitachi group of companies (#7) has grown by 17% over the year – thanks in part to expansion at Hitachi Rail and Horizon Nuclear Power – but the bulk of its employees continue to be at consumer loans company Hitachi Capital.

    Dentsu Aegis Network, part of the Dentsu advertising agency, has continued to acquire across the UK and Europe, resulting in a 21% increase in headcount.  Other notable increases thanks to acquisitions include Mitsui Sumitomo & Aioi Nissay Dowa acquiring Lloyds underwriters Amlin and of course Softbank, a new entrant to the top 30, with its acquisition of ARM.

    The story of Japanese companies in the UK continues to be the story of the UK economy overall – a trend which will no doubt continue in 2017, with Japanese banks already strengthening and relocating to their other European Union based operations, or threatening to do so.

    Customised reports, profiles and other research on the Top 30 largest Japanese companies in Europe, Middle East and Africa are available – please contact pernille.rudlin@rudlinconsulting.com for further details.

     
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  • The tragic limitations to Japan’s lifetime employment system

    The tragic limitations to Japan’s lifetime employment system

    Since the suicide of a young female employee at advertising giant Dentsu in December 2015 was deemed to be due to overwork, there has been a rash of articles in the Japanese media asking whether it’s time to change Japan’s lifetime employee “seishain” (regular or proper staff) system (previously blogged about here).

    Nikkei Business described the main characteristics of the seishain system as:

    • No job role boundaries
    • Long work hours
    • Pay increases based on seniority

    Which results in:

    1. Strict terms of employment, so when there is an an economic downturn, the employee can be reassigned
    2. Seishain as fixed costs, so it is difficult to transfer over non-regular staff into the system
    3. Seishain not being hired into a role, but into the company, so you do not have transferable skills which will enable you to work elsewhere
    4. Irrational human resource allocation because of features of the system such as retirement from line management at 55
    5. Difficulties in utilising seishain who have household or elderly care duties
    6. A reduction in pension and health insurance benefits because of transferring to a smaller company from a larger company
    7. The risk of losing the element of salary that was based on seniority if you change employers
    8. A lack of workers shifting from dying industries to growth sectors

    There is still a big pay gap between seishain and non-seishain, and yet the real average pay of all employees in Japan has fallen since 2005 (with 2002 as the base=100, 2015 = 95).

    30% of Japanese men and 10% of Japanese women work more than 49 hours a week, compared to 17% in the USA, 18% in the UK for men/6% for women, 16% of German men/4% German women, 15% of French men and 6% of women and 10% of Swedish men and 4% of Swedish women.

    The percentage is even higher for Japanese seishain – 40% of men, 20% of women.

    A Nikkei internet survey of 1343 Japanese employees revealed that the biggest reason (70%) for overtime was that there was such a volume of work. Just under 40% said there was a lack of people to do the work.  Other reasons were that there were particular features of their work requiring overtime, that there were too many meetings, that it was expected of them, that it was difficult to go home if others were working and the least popular reason was “in order to increase pay”.

    But as one of the participants said in one of my seminars last week – Japanese employees are very expert at stretching their work out so that overtime becomes necessary.  The urge for 100% perfection in the tiniest details is also a root cause I would say.

    There are signs of change – some companies have started paying part timers and contract workers exactly the same as seishain and many companies are trying to improve productivity and reduce working hours.

    Prime Minister Abe announced in September a Council for the Realization of Work Style Reform – to tackle 9 areas – listed here – in an attempt to address the limitations of the lifetime employment system.  Interesting to see that “the issue of the acceptance of foreign personnel” is #9.

  • Employers need to change to encourage Japan’s milliennials to be mobile

    Employers need to change to encourage Japan’s milliennials to be mobile

    European employers, just as in Japan, are worrying about how to manage and motivate the so-called millennial generation – people who were born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s.

    Across the world, one characteristic that unites the millennial generation is, of course, a high use of social media.  There is some evidence that this has led to a more open minded attitude to the rest of the world.  In the UK, the millennial generation is much more pro-European Union and pro-migrant than the older generations.  Millennials are used to building relationships with people they have never met, through mutual interests and hobbies, regardless of their location or nationality or gender.

    This has translated into a higher desire than other generations to live, work or study outside their home country. 71% of millennials, regardless of gender, want to work outside their home country during their career, according to a global survey by PwC in 2015.  A multigenerational global survey by PwC in the same year showed that all age groups and genders overwhelmingly agreed that secondment early in a career was also critical.

    Yet I have seen surveys of Japanese millennials which show that fewer of them are studying abroad or want to be seconded overseas than previous generations. I expect their concern, which is also the top concern of other nationalities, is what their role will be when they are repatriated to their home country.

    I suspect there are also assumptions being made on the employer side about who an expatriate should be and what the role should involve.  I recently met a British academic who had interviewed various Japanese women living in the UK and she found that many of them joined a Japanese company in Japan, in the expectation that they would be posted overseas.  Yet their requests to be seconded were ignored, so they quit their companies and moved abroad themselves.

    It seems to me that many of the issues Japanese companies are facing such as attracting and retaining younger people, an ageing workforce or a lack of men or women who can take up global management roles could be resolved by having a more integrated and inclusive approach to job mobility.  It is quite normal for European companies to hire graduates from across Europe, and then rotate them around their operations in different countries.  A few of our larger clients are now rotating their graduates to Japan too.  Global roles do not have to be for 3-5 years in another country – they can be permanent, a few months or indeed a virtual global role.

    One of the messages from the campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union – aimed at the millennial generation – is that if the UK leaves the EU, it will be less easy for young British people to study or work in other European countries.  Unfortunately, one other characteristic of the millennial generation is that they are less likely to vote than the more pro-Brexit older generations.

    This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News and also is in Pernille Rudlin’s new book  “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe”  – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.

  • Why Nissan matters more to the UK than the UK matters to Nissan

    Why Nissan matters more to the UK than the UK matters to Nissan

    It will be interesting to see how far Ghosn’s well documented ruthlessness and unsentimentality which he demonstrated in turning around Nissan in Japan will come to the fore in next month’s decision about where to invest for the new Qashqai, because really, to Nissan, the UK is not as important as a market or a manufacturing base as the UK might like to think.  Plus, Ghosn has now got Mitsubishi Motors to worry about as well.

    Here’s some figures to illustrate:

    • UK based employees represent around 5% of Nissan’s global workforce
    • UK based production represents around 10% of Nissan’s global production and around 70% of its European production (the rest is manufactured in Spain and Russia).
    • Car sales in the UK market represent around 3% of Nissan’s total units sold worldwide. Europe & Russia represent around 15% of total units sold.  So the UK market is about 20% of Nissan’s Europe & Russia regional sales.

    From the UK perspective:

    • Nissan is the third largest Japanese employer in the UK, with around 8000 employees – not only in the Sunderland factory but also several hundred working in design at Nissan Technical Centre Europe in Cranfield (ultimately registered in Belgium so that should make a quick getaway easier) and a design centre in London
    • Nissan is the 8th largest Japanese employer in Europe – around 16,000 employees in total – so around half are in the UK.  However the European regional headquarters is in Switzerland, to which the UK factory sells all its production. The operational headquarters and holding company for the rest of Europe is based in France.
    • Nissan Sunderland’s plant accounts for nearly 1/3 of the UK’s car production.  80% of it is ultimately exported, 76% to Europe.

    And of course there’s the supply chain and the jobs it provides – the UK car industry likes to say it supports around 800,000 jobs.

    Calsonic Kansei is a supplier to Nissan, and is also in our Top 30 Japanese companies in the UK, employing over 1300 people – with factories in Llanelli and Sunderland – and Spain.  Nissan has a substantial stake in Calsonic Kansei, but the cosy mutually supportive supply chains of 20 years’ ago have long disappeared, thanks in part to Ghosn.  So it’s not hard to see Calsonic Kansei and others responding as quickly as they can to any shifts in location of demand.

    It’s legendary in Japan that when a Nissan employee went to Ghosn to beg him not to axe one of the suppliers totally dependent on Nissan because it was headed up by a member of their own family, Ghosn responded “which is it to be?  That Nissan collapses or your uncle’s company collapses?”

    For how complex and tough life is these days in the global automotive supply chain, this comment in the Financial Times recently was very revealing:

    “We manufacture part of one component for the Nissan Qashqai. We purchase raw materials from Taiwan, we manufacture in the UK in a Japanese owned factory. Our customer is in Germany, where our product is bonded together with products from other countries. Our customer’s customer is in France, where the bonded component is integrated into a car component. The component is shipped to Sunderland and becomes a part of a “British” car.

    How Mrs May and her merry band are going to sort this mess out is beyond me, and I suspect beyond them.

    The development time lines for the most basic of automotive components is two to three years, which means that we are already “post Brexit” for new business development. How do I persuade customers to invest in new product development with us when nobody has a clue on what basis I might sell eventually sell my product to them, and given rules of origin, in some cases on what basis they might sell their product to their customer. We have good relationships with our customers, but at the end of the day they are running their business for their benefit and may well decide its just not worth the uncertainty and risk.”

    Carlos Ghosn is “reassured” by Theresa May saying that the British government would be “extremely cautious” in maintaining  Nissan’s Sunderland UK factory’s competitiveness.  But he may nonetheless think some rebalancing is in order.

  • European pride + global standardization = long debates

    European pride + global standardization = long debates

    The European senior management team of a business which had been newly acquired by a Japanese company complained to me about being treated as if Europe was one homogenous country, when in fact they only had offices in 5 very different countries in Europe, with a headquarters in Germany.  “It’s true, we know how to work with each other in Europe – after all Europeans have been living and working together for hundreds of years, but it seems strange that on paper we’re supposed to be a tri-regional structure of Europe, North America and Asia, and yet North America has only two employees and Asia has no regional headquarters, with Taiwan, China, Korea and Japan being managed separately”

    This was just a small company, but actually I have seen similar situations in many other much larger Japanese multinationals.  It’s partly that Europeans are very sensitive to their status –and want to be treated on a par with other regional heads – and this means the European definition of regions, with Asia as one region.

    But it’s also due to a justifiable concern that if the company is meant to be offering global products and services, it needs to have a well-balanced global structure operating off common platforms, systems and processes.  If the company grows by acquisition, you often end up with very different portfolios of services and products from country to country, incompatible processes and systems and no clear idea of how revenue and costs should be shared across the regions which are contributing to the global offering.

    This can cause huge, long running arguments, partly because standardizing trade, production processes and technology are interrelated issues.  Once you decide what products and services are global and what are local, you have the basis for splitting revenue accordingly.  But you have to be careful this does not lead to regional organisations focusing on their local products and services, refusing to participate in global contracts because they make more profit out of local contracts.

    Once you know what you are offering globally, you can standardise the technology – such as having all the company’s websites running off the same content management system, or production running off the same platforms or sales and purchasing using the same global accounting system.

    Sometimes Japan headquarters has to swallow their pride for the sake of speed and efficiency.  I was impressed that Nomura, when it acquired Lehman Brothers, decided to move their dealing onto the Lehman platform, because they judged it to be technically superior and faster than trying to integrate platforms or shift everyone onto the Japanese system.

    Nobody wants to deal with these problems because they are so complex and lead to fights and easy resistance by those claiming that the global standard is not going to work in their markets.  But unfortunately, if you do not deal with these issues soon after an acquisition, they fester and become even more difficult to resolve.

    This article was originally published in Japanese for the Teikoku Databank News and appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book  “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe”  – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.

  • Large, stable employers are important for the health of the community, whatever the country of origin

    Large, stable employers are important for the health of the community, whatever the country of origin

    You may remember, though it feels like a lifetime ago given what has happened since, that the front pages of the British business press in early 2014 were full of debate about whether to welcome or be worried by the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s bid to take over AstraZeneca, a UK-Swedish company.  The £63bn bid would have made it the biggest foreign takeover of a British company in history.

    Initially the British government wanted to portray the bid as a vote of confidence in what they had done to make Britain an attractive destination for foreign investment.  However, the former CEO of AstraZeneca, Sir David Barnes, said that he was concerned that Pfizer would “act like a praying mantis and suck the lifeblood out of their prey. “ Pfizer wants to move its tax domicile to Britain when it acquires AstraZeneca, to take advantage of the UK’s low corporate tax rate and what is called a “patent box”, which gives tax breaks for research.

    If Pfizer want these tax incentives, it should invest in the UK itself, and not attempt to do it via a takeover, Sir David argued.  Pfizer last hit the headlines in the UK when it closed down its 60 year old research facilities in the east of England, with the loss of nearly 2000 jobs, in 2011.  A few years before that it closed R&D sites in Nagoya, Japan and the US.  The reasoning at the time was that research was better outsourced to smaller companies.

    I have not heard anyone say that this trend has reversed, yet AstraZeneca committed to investing £500 million in a new research facility and headquarters in Cambridge, which is the main science cluster in the UK.   Pfizer say it would honour this investment, and the jobs that depend on it, for five years at least.

    The consensus in the UK seemed to be that given Pfizer’s “accounting led” approach, such commitments may not be worth much.  The US company Kraft also promised it would not cut jobs when it took over one of the UK’s most famous companies, the chocolate manufacturer Cadburys, in 2010, and then shortly after closed down one of its factories.

    This does not mean that the UK is hostile to all foreign takeovers, however.  Japanese companies are much more welcome, as they are seen as having long term commitment to their investments.  Takeda’s acquisition of Swiss company Nycomed did lead to job losses but this is seen as inevitable after a merger.*  It is the wholesale closure of a factory or R&D site with major impact on the community around it which troubles people in Europe.

    Many of the British researchers laid off by Pfizer in 2011 have found jobs in small start ups, but not everyone can be an entrepreneur or has the personal resilience to go through the trauma of redundancy. When I ask participants in my training what they like about working in a Japanese company, they almost always mention the stability, the long term view and the loyalty of the company to its staff.   Large, stable employers are important for the health of the community, whatever the country of origin.

    * Takeda announced it would close its Cambridge Science Park R&D facility in August 2016.  R&D activity will be concentrated in the US and Japan, and the UK will move from global coordination activities to European only.  I wonder how long that will last if the European Medicines Agency moves out of the UK however.

    This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 11th June January 2014 and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book  “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.

  • Brexit business opportunities for Japanese companies

    Brexit business opportunities for Japanese companies

    A couple of Japanese expatriate business people with whom I was having lunch with recently both remarked how surprised they were that their British colleagues were quick to recover from the Brexit shock and think positively about the business opportunities it might bring.  I too have been trying to be positive and have been doing some further research into how Japanese companies are evolving in the UK. The opportunities I have identified for Japanese companies in the UK are:

    1. Africa and the Middle East

    The UK has historic ties to Africa and the Middle East, which means that is still a good base for coordinating activities across those regions as there are many expatriates from and experts in those regions, who live in the UK, and are sources of information and management capability.

    The UK government is going to be looking to boost trade to non-EU countries, as a counterbalance to any negative impact from Brexit on trade with the EU, so there is likely to be plenty of support for developing business with these regions.

    It might even be easier than before to hire people from those regions in the UK. Although a vote for Brexit was partly to stop immigration to the UK, this was very much about preventing lower skilled people from Eastern Europe living in the UK. Most Japanese companies were not hiring such people in the first place, so I doubt any restrictions on this kind of immigration will have much impact.

    Japanese financial services companies are already changing the status of non-UK branches to a European Union branch or incorporated subsidiary, and are strengthening their African operations, but it looks like those operations will still be reporting into the London office, which will act as an EMEA coordination function.

    Japanese manufacturers have already shifted lower skilled, labour intensive production eastwards in Europe or to Africa and I assume Brexit will accelerate this trend, with the UK being a regional hub for engineering design and development expertise

    2. Infrastructure

    Despite the fact that manufacturing has moved eastwards or south to Africa, the British government is well aware that British people desperately want well paid, secure manual worker jobs to return to the UK. The most obvious way to do this is through public sector investment in transportation and energy.   Hitachi and other such infrastructure companies should still find plenty of business, although it is not clear what will happen to EU funding for energy and transport infrastructure projects.

    3. Acquisitions in the UK

    As Softbank’s acquisition of ARM proved, there are still companies in the UK which are attractive acquisition targets, not as a gateway to the Single Market but because they are unique in terms of their brand, technology or expertise. For example, food and drink brands unique to the UK, Lloyds underwriters and UK advertising agencies have all recently been acquired by Japanese companies.  It seems likely the weak pound and strong yen will continue for a while, so there may be some bargains for the brave.

    This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 14th September 2016 and is also published in Pernille Rudlin’s new book  “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe”  – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.

  • Japan – into Africa

    Japan – into Africa

    Many Japanese companies have set up European regional headquarters, largely in the UK, Germany or the Netherlands and use this as a base for consolidating their administrative activities across the region.  Increasingly these days the designated region covered is not just Europe, but EMEA – Europe, Middle East and Africa.  The historical ties that the UK in particular has with Africa and the Middle East, means that it is not only easy to access the Middle East and Africa from London, but also that it is relatively easy to get hold of information about countries in those regions in the UK as there are many expatriates and experts on those countries based in the UK.

    One such expert is Professor Sir Paul Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford University, whose speech to a group of Japanese businesspeople in London I attended a while back. Sir Paul had met Shinzo Abe at a G8 meeting, and his speech was largely in support of the recent initiatives by Abe and Japanese businesses to become more involved in Africa, recently reinforced by the TICAD meeting in Nairobi.

    He is realistic, however, saying that “I am not going to tell you Africa is wonderful.  Africa is complicated and has a small economy, but it has got significant opportunities.”  The opportunities fall into four main areas – natural resources, the infrastructure needed to exploit those resources, growth in sectors such as electric power, construction, consumer goods and the “e-economy” such as payments by mobile phone.

    He also pointed to the specific attractions that Africa would have for Japan.  Firstly that as African growth is very commodity price dependent, and Japan is a big commodity importer, having investments in Africa is a useful “hedge” against commodity price movements.  Secondly, Japan is apparently welcome in Africa.  “Africa is tired of Europe and doesn’t like being told what to do”.  The USA behaves like a colonial power but does not have any money to invest into Africa.  China was hugely popular in Africa 10 years ago, but apparently many African leaders are now feeling frightened of becoming too dependent on China and are trying to push back on deals.

    The biggest negative for Japan, in Sir Paul’s opinion, is that culturally, “Africa is Japan upside down.  Japanese society is one of very high trust and very high social cohesion, and Africa isn’t”.   And of course, Africa isn’t one country but 54 countries and the levels of opportunities and risk vary considerably from one country to another.  Sir Paul’s recommendations were to focus on Lagos and Nairobi, with possibly a sub office in Rwanda.  With regard to corruption, the risk is reputational rather than financial, and he recommends having a policy and making it very clear to counterparts what that policy is.

    He also reinforced the view that approaching Africa from the UK was a good tactic.  “The UK, public and private sectors, have the knowledge, network and the contacts but not the products that Africa wants.”  Japan has those products, so, teaming up with the British should bring plenty of mutual benefit.

    This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 14th May 2014 and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book  “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.