It all depends on what you mean by big, of course. And, it turns out, what you mean by foreign.
Our favourite way of measuring size and growth at Rudlin Consulting has been by numbers of employees, because ranking by capital or turnover risks comparing apples to oranges. Taking a look at the rankings compiled by Toyo Keizai, the top 10 foreign companies in Japan in terms of numbers of employees are:
- Accenture (25,000 employees)
- Gibraltar Life Insurance (12,003 – US parent company Prudential)
- Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus (10,633 – German parent company Daimler Truck)
- Metlife (8,569 US parent company)
- Prudential Life Insurance (6,169 US parent company)
- AIG (6,064 US parent company)
- Proterial (5,759 was Hitachi Metals, now owned by Bain)
- Sharp (5,603, now owned by Taiwan’s Foxconn/Hon Hai)
- Starbucks (5,505 US parent company)
- Bosch (5,254 German parent company)
It’s interesting to note that the majority of these companies are services sector, particularly insurance companies. Three out of the four manufacturing companies were originally Japanese but have been acquired by foreign companies. Some of the life insurance companies have also built up presence in Japan through acquisition, but are also divesting. Bosch also acquired a few Japan owned businesses but also divested its stake in Denso.
Toyo Keizai has not designated a nationality or parent company for Accenture, presumably because of being a federation of local partnerships. Similarly, EY and Deloitte should be in the top 10 as both employ over 10,000 but because of the partnership structure are not included in Toyo Keizai Rankings.
The rankings by capital (not market capitalization) are dominated by financial services sector companies:
- Nippon Paint (now majority owned by Singapore based Wuthelam Holdings)
- Metlife
- IBM Japan
- BNP Paribas Securities
- Citigroup Securities
- Axa Life
- Goldman Sachs Securities
- Bank of America Securities
- Gibraltar Life
- JP Morgan Securities
The rankings by turnover are:
- Sharp
- Nippon Paint
- Microsoft Japan
- Chugai (owned by Roche)
- Proterial
- IBM Japan
- Mitsubishi Fuso Truck
- NOK (owned by German company Freudenberg)
- Accenture
- Mercedes Benz
60% of these companies were originally Japanese.
Looking at all three rankings, it’s not surprising to see that these companies are long established in Japan. Looking at the newcomers, and the sectors of the future, there is a clear trend of IT, systems and software companies entering the Japanese market, primarily from the USA, but also France, Germany, Luxembourg, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the UK. We’ve certainly seen a marked increase in enquiries for our services at Japan Intercultural Consulting from non-Japanese companies in this sector over the past couple of years. Japanese companies are embarking on digital transformation and further globalization, and the organisational change that this entails throws up plenty of cross cultural challenges both for the suppliers of digital technology and their clients.
Japan Intercultural Consulting holds regular online seminars covering topics such as cross cultural communications, business trips to Japan and what Japanese customers want.
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