Brexit

Pernille Rudlin gives evidence to the UK Trade and Business Commission on UK-Japan trade and business relationships

Pernille Rudlin gave evidence on the impact of the UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement to the June 6th session of UK Trade and Business Commission.

It was interesting to discover that the trade statistics tracked by Dr Minako Morita-Jaeger, showing a decline in UK exports to Japan since around 2018, with particularly strong decline since 2020 in financial services match our observation that the number of people employed by Japanese companies in the UK has fallen, as have the numbers of Japanese companies and nationals in the UK from around the same time.

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Japanese manufacturing in the UK – resilient, but not growing

Excluding automotive production, Japanese manufacturing operations in the UK have been relatively stable since 2015/6.  Out of 200 or so companies, only a handful of companies have closed in the past five years, and much of this was to do with consolidating operations rather than withdrawing entirely from the UK.  Many of the Japanese manufacturers date back to the 1970s, and the oldest established, YKK, has been manufacturing in the UK since 1966.

There have not been many new entrants either over the past five years – apart from Mechatronics (owned by JTEKT) and other “new” entrants which are the UK subsidiaries of American or Swiss operations acquired by Japanese companies such as Stolle (acquired by Toyo Seikan), Hitachi Energy (was ABB Power Grids) and Avista (acquired by Kurita)

M&A

Around two-thirds of the companies in this sector are the product of, or have conducted M&A in the UK. Japanese M&A activity across the UK and Europe has dwindled away in recent years, perhaps because of the difficulty of doing due diligence in a pandemic, or Brexit making acquisition of a UK manufacturing operation that may be part of an EU supply chain less attractive.  There does not seem to be any particular trend to acquisitions in the UK, other than clusters of purchases in packaging, agrochemicals and food processing.

Notable recent acquisitions of UK companies include:

• Hitachi Rail acquiring Perpetuum (2021)
• Olympus acquiring medical device maker ARC Medical Design (2020)
• Mitsubishi Heavy Industries acquiring the remaining stake in Primetals from Siemens, Hitachi and others (2019)
• Sumitomo Heavy Industries acquiring Invertek Drives (2019)
• Nippon Suisan acquiring Caistor Seafoods and Flatfish (2017-2019)
• Rengo acquiring various packaging companies such as Tri-Wall and Welsh Boxes (2016-2020)
• Agrovista (owned by Marubeni) acquiring various British agrochemical companies (2016-2019)
• Sanwa acquiring Bolton Gate Services (2018)
• Calbee acquiring Seabrook Crisps (2018)
• Sansetsu (packaging) acquiring Truckwright (2018)
• Sintokogio acquiring Omega (foundry machinery) (2018)
• Konica Minolta acquiring Charterhouse and Indicia (printing) (2017-8)
• Taiyo Nippon Sanso acquiring US company Praxair’s European gas business (2018)

Employment

Around 39,500 people were employed in the UK by non automotive Japanese manufacturers in 2015/6 and after a few years of growth to around 42,000, this fell to 39,167 in 2020/21. Judging by the results of the 60 or so companies who have reported for 2021/22, this downward trend is continuing. If automotive manufacturing employment is added back in, there were around 60,600 people employed in Japan-owned manufacturing in the UK in 2020/21, almost the same as were employed in 2015/6. As we explained elsewhere, this number is likely to fall in 2021/22 with the closure of Honda Swindon and other suppliers to Honda.

UK and Europe

How this compares with other European countries can be seen in the chart on the left – which shows the numbers of all manufacturing companies in Europe, including automotive. According to Toyo Keizai, the number of Japanese manufacturers in the UK dipped around 2017/8, but recovered, with another more recent fall. But there was growth overall since 2015/6, with 228 companies in 2021/2 compared to 215 in 2015/6  – a 6% increase.  This is much lower than the overall 20% growth in Europe, and as a consequence the UK is no longer the largest host of Japanese manufacturers.

The number of Japanese manufacturers in Germany has grown 35%, and growth is continuing, widening the gap with the UK. France is a clear third, and is showing signs of growth tailing off. Netherlands, Turkey, Poland and Nordic countries are showing higher than average growth as hosts.

The growth of the number of Japanese manufacturing operations in Europe of 20% since 2015/6, from 1,147 to 1,381 companies was actually higher than the growth seen in Asia (7% to 9,047) or the USA (13% to 1,563). The number of Japanese manufacturing operations in Africa has grown 25% over the period – but from a much lower base of 57 to 71.

Japanese manufacturing in the UK “despite” Brexit has remained stable thanks to the resilience built up by those companies through being long established in the UK, benefitting from Japan HQ risk aversion and long term planning and having experienced, local management.  These factors have not attracted the growth seen in other countries in Europe, however.

A directory of 205 Japan owned companies with production facilities in the UK, giving their full names, parent company, type of business and latest number of employees is available for £20 + VAT. Please contact us for an invoice and payment details via PayPal.

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Trends in Japan owned financial services companies in the UK

Around 14,000 people worked for 85 Japan owned financial services companies in the UK in 2021. This is around 1,000 more people than in 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum. Although all the main banking, securities and insurance groups (Mizuho, MUFG, MS&AD, Nomura and SMFG) opened or strengthened EU entities as a Brexit countermeasure, it does not seem as if large numbers of jobs have shifted to those entities, or that there have been layoffs in the UK, and large scale hiring in the EU.

The surface calm does mask some restructuring, however, which are difficult to detect in the case of MUFG and Mizuho, as their banks in London are run as branches (of the Netherlands European HQ in MUFG’s case, and of Tokyo HQ in Mizuho’s case), and therefore do not have to publish company accounts with official employee figures.  It was reported that MUFG offered 500 directors redundancy packages in 2019, but at the same time, subsidiaries such as Mitsubishi HC Capital and MUFG Securities have been growing substantially, with further employees added to the group through the acquisition of First Sentier Investments.

Rival banking group SMBC has incorporated its subsidiaries in the UK and its European headquarters is in London, so more accurate figures are available, which show employee numbers at the bank have grown by 45% to 1,246 from 2016 to 2021.

Nomura International on the other hand has 29% fewer employees in 2021 than it did in 2016, but a recent hiring spree has brought its London employee total back up to over 2,000 according to its annual report released in 2022. The Daiwa group has also grown, particularly on the corporate advisory side.

Recent growth in employee numbers has been more organic than through M&A. The only acquisition since MUFG acquired the Australian investment firm (with substantial presence in the UK) First Sentier in 2019 has been Orix acquiring Gravis Capital Management and SBI acquiring B2C2, a cryptocurrency firm employing 46 people.

Closures in the past 4 years include Finatext UK, Spitalgate Dealer Services (which was providing financing for Mitsubishi car dealers), Speedloan Finance – a pawnbrokers acquired by Daikokuya in 2015 and the branch offices of Okasan Securities and the Bank of Yokohama.

It may be that the apparent stability of Japanese companies in the UK was partly the result of a delay to relocations to the EU caused by the pandemic, and that further friction with the EU may lead to pressure being brought up on financial services companies to shift more of their business to the Continent. A further factor is the extent to which London is still seen as the place to learn about and develop the new business areas which Japanese financial services companies are investing in.

Examining the statistics from Japan’s Ministry of Finance on direct investment flows, it seems the UK benefitted from a big inward investment from Japan into the finance and insurance sector in 2016, then there was net disinvestment in 2017-2019, and then increasing net investment in 2020-21. Conversely, there was little investment into Ireland, Luxembourg or the Netherlands in 2016, but major investments into their finance and insurance sectors in 2017, 2018 and 2020-21.

A directory of 85 Japan owned financial services companies, giving their full names, parent company, type of business and latest number of employees is available for £10 + VAT. Please contact us for an invoice and payment details via PayPal.

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

Top 30 Japanese Employers in the Netherlands 2021

There’s no doubt the Netherlands has done well from Brexit in terms of Japanese investment into Europe. Its strong services sector has made it a useful alternative regional coordination hub to London and there is a longstanding thriving Japanese community in the Amsterdam area. Both the numbers of Japanese nationals living in the Netherlands and the numbers of Japanese companies in the Netherlands have shot up the past few years, in contrast to a clear decline in Japanese companies in the UK, and a rather more bumpy but downward trend in Japanese nationals in the UK.  There have also been some significant acquisitions of Dutch companies by Japanese companies since 2016.

The number of Japanese companies in Germany, the largest host in Europe, has also grown steadily over the past few years, making the sudden rise in Japanese companies in the Netherlands and Italy in the past two years look somewhat anomalous. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) does not explain what caused this sudden leap but they are sticking to their guns with the recent release of the data for 2020.

Cross referencing the MoFA data with the Toyo Keizai directory and our own desk research, we think the sudden jump in the number of Japanese companies in the Netherlands and Italy are probably to do with the recent acquisitions – perhaps Outsourcing acquiring Netherlands headquartered Otto Work Force in 2018, supplemented by Mitsubishi Corporation acquiring Dutch energy company ENECO in 2020. In the case of Italy, it could be due to Hitachi acquiring various companies from Ansaldo STS.

Our database contains 352 Japanese companies in Italy, sitting neatly betwen the 415 registered by MoFA and the 269 recorded in the Toyo Keizai directory.  But our estimate of 503 Japanese companies in the Netherlands is lower than both the 525 in the Toyo Keizai and the 639 in MoFA’s records. We only enter companies which we can verify have employees into our database, which is why we appear to have under-recorded the number. Many of the companies identified by Toyo Keizai and presumably MoFA are brass plate, holding company type entities. As was seen in the acquisition of Otto Work Force, even one company in the Netherlands turns out to have multiple legal entities attached to it – at least 9 different subsidiaries are associated with Otto Work Force in the Netherlands. According to Dun & Bradstreet, Outsourcing’s holding company in the Netherlands now has over 50 companies associated with it.

Some of the Netherlands based companies we have not recorded may well have employees, but it seems Dutch companies are not obliged to disclose as much information as similar companies in the UK, for example – where employee numbers, even for the smallest company, are disclosed and freely available on Companies House.

Bearing the lack of data in mind, our Top 30 Japanese companies in the Netherlands needs to be treated with caution, but we can certainly see that Outsourcing and Mitsubishi Corporation‘s recent acquisitions have pushed them into the Top 30. Recruit, another major Japanese recruitment company, also entered the Top 30 with its acquisition of USG People in 2015 and Orix, the Japanese financial services company, acquired Dutch asset manager Robeco in 2013.

As these acquisitions show,  Japanese companies have mainly been investing in the Netherlands’ services sector. There are some companies with manufacturing operations such as Omron, making control equipment, factory automation systems, electronic components, automotive electronics, ticket vending machines and medical equipment.  Toyota Industries entered the Top 30 with its acquisition of materials handling systems manufacturer Vanderlande in 2017 and Canon manufactures printing production systems, as one of its legacies of acquring Oce more than ten years ago. Other major manufacturers are Astellas (pharmaceuticals) and Teijin (fiber). The notable absences from the Top 30 in terms of manufacturing are from the automotive sector – no Japanese car companies have plants in the Netherlands, and as a consequence, none of their suppliers do either.

The 30,000 employees who work for the Top 30 largest Japanese employers in the Netherlands represent around 70% of the total number of Netherlands based employees working in Japanese companies. This puts the Netherlands in equal 7th place with the Czech Republic in terms of largest numbers of employees in Europe, after Germany, UK, France, Poland, Italy and Spain. As the Netherlands is host to the fifth largest number of Japanese nationals and fourth largest number of Japanese companies, this is a further indication that the Netherlands has relatively few manufacturers with large numbers of employees and rather more in the way of holding companies with no employees,  and a relatively higher density of Japanese expatriates compared to some other European countries.

The 2022 Top 30 Japanese employers in the Netherlands is available to download here

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