One of the few new Japanese companies to join the Japanese Chamber of Commerce & Industry in the UK in 2020 was Sekisui House. Daiwa House also announced at the end of 2020 that they were going to acquire Dutch modular housing builder Jan Snel.

Both companies cite the housing shortage and scarcity of skills across Europe as a reason for their expansion. We have certainly been suffering from a housing shortage in the UK for many years. When I studied the problem 30 years’ ago at university, I remember being told that one issue was not so much a lack of housing, but a lack of adequate housing. There were and still are a lot of older houses, even dating back to the 19^th century, which are not fit for modern day living.

Another issue which has become more acute is that these houses, even if refurbished, are not where people want to live. We still have an economic north/south divide in the UK, thanks to the decline of industry. Big northern towns and cities have no jobs, but plenty of empty, dilapidated housing. Cities in the south are not building enough new housing for the increase in population. As a result, young people are having to share crowded houses and apartments and cannot afford the mortgage needed to buy anywhere.

Building more new houses in those cities is the obvious solution, except that there is a lack of land on which to do so. There was an attempt to allow old office blocks to be turned into apartments, but this resulted in some very low quality, unhealthy housing.

Land is available in the commuter zones outside London, but this has been protected for many years by a so-called Green Belt, which tries to preserve green fields and woodland. Although this may seem a worthy ecological cause, it has mostly been exploited by the residents of those areas who do not like the idea of new houses and newcomers and a consequent hit to the value of their own homes.

I used to live in one of those areas, near a train station which took me directly into central London in 47 minutes. It was right by the M25 orbital motorway, and there was a constant noise from nearby Heathrow and Gatwick airports. I thought at the time that claiming this was green belt and refusing to build more homes in the area was not only selfish, but a denial of reality.

For the first time in the UK, and possibly in the world, air pollution has been ruled as the cause of death of little girl who had asthma and lived in London. I thought back to our time living in the “green belt” and the air pollution we tolerated there. If Sekisui and Daiwa are going to be able to build housing in those areas, their low carbon technology, with effective air conditioning systems,  should be much welcomed.

This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News

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Poland and other Eastern European nations are a forgotten economic success story, according to Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley Investment Management in a recent Financial Times opinion piece. The Czech and Slovak Republics, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Slovenia have all made it into the advanced economies, as defined by the IMF, and have a per capita income of $17,000, with Poland not far behind at a per capita income of $15,000. Hungary is even closer, with per capita income of $16,000 and Romania is also catching up, on $13,000.  Quality of institutions and other more subjective factors are included in the IMF criteria, so it may be that if some of these countries are judged to have deteriorated under a populist government, then promotion to the premier division will be delayed.

Sharma argues that consistent long term growth is the key to economic success, and manufacturing prowess lies behind this for Eastern Europe. Poland has grown at an average of 4% a year over the past three decades, without a single year of negative growth. Japanese companies do seem to have been attracted to this economic stability. According to our research, Japanese companies in Poland now employ around 53,000 people, making it the fourth largest base for Japanese company employees in the European region after the UK (176,000), Germany (167,000) and France (75,000).

The largest Japanese employers in Poland are indeed manufacturers such as Sumitomo Electric Industries (Sumitomo Electric Wiring/Bordnetze producing harnesses and Sumitomo Riko producing hoses for the automotive industry) and other automotive suppliers such as NGK Insulators, NSG (automotive glass), Toyota Motor, NSK, Bridgestone and Yazaki.

Beer and cigarette manufacturers also feature – Asahi after their acquisition of Polish beer brands Tyskie and Lech, and Japan Tobacco has a factory in Poland manufacturing Winston and Camel. A further vice, chocolate, is also manufactured by a Japan headquartered company Lotte, via their 2010 acquisition of Wedel.

There are some large services sector employers as well – Fujitsu has around 3,000 employees working in its global delivery centres in Katowice and Łódź. However, we estimate around a third of the 200 Japanese companies in Poland have plants there, compared to 16% of the 1000+ Japanese companies in the UK or Germany.

We may still be missing a few Japanese companies in Poland. There are relatively fewer Japanese expatriates in Poland compared to other countries which host larger numbers of Japanese companies. This may cause some underreporting to database survey companies such as Toyo Keizai, which only records around 130 Japanese companies in Poland, and less than 20,000 employees, compared to our estimates of over 200 companies and 53,000 employees.  There is still a tendency by Japanese companies to locate their Japanese expatriates in Germany, to manage Eastern European subsidiaries and branches from there. The Polish investment agency says there are 300 companies in Poland employing over 40,000, in 2019.

Cornel Ban, of the Copenhagen Business School, responded to Sharma’s piece by arguing that a high risk of stagnation in countries such as Poland is “baked in”, if they only rely on low labour costs. There is a lack of investment in training and R&D and that “the multinational manufacturing firms that dominate these countries’ export-led growth regimes have few incentives to relocate significant technical innovation systems in the region.”  As far as we can ascertain, there are only a few Japanese companies that are conducting R&D in Poland – Canon Ophthalmic Technologies, Fujitsu‘s FQS in computational chemistry systems and Rigaku in thin films and materials.

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We’ve just compiled our first ever Top 30 for Japanese employers in Italy (see below for updated 2022 version). We’ve thought for a while that Tōyō Keizai underreported the number of employees in Italy, and that it probably ranked fourth after the UK, Germany and France in terms of numbers employed. Tōyō Keizai records 16,500 employees at 270 companies.  We estimate it’s more like 50,000 employees at 350 or so companies. We were also wondering what might be behind the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs data showing a sudden rise from 300 Japanese companies in Italy in 2018 to 425 to 2019.

The answer to both puzzles might lie in the fact that the Hitachi group, which was the largest Japanese employer in Italy, acquired various rail businesses from Ansaldo in 2019 and one of its subsidiaries, Hitachi Chemical, acquired FIAMM in 2020.  Hitachi has now dropped one rank, to the second largest Japanese employer in Italy, behind the NTT group, as Hitachi Chemical was acquired by Showa Denko in 2020. Another factor is that the NTT group has also grown substantially in Italy recently, mainly thanks to acquisitions by NTT Data.

Other large Japanese employers in Italy are the result of earlier acquisitions: Denso has some of its major manufacturing operations in Italy, deriving from acquisitions from Magneti Marelli more than 20 years’ ago. Denso Thermal Systems S.p.A. is now the regional headquarters for the air conditioning manufacturing business.

Mitsubishi Electric at #5 acquired Italian firm Climaveneta in 2015. Nidec, the 6th largest Japanese employer in Italy, acquired Ansaldo Sistemi Industriali S.p.A. in 2012. Sumitomo Heavy Industries acquired Lafert (electric motors and drives) in 2018.

So it seems likely the underestimation of Italy lies more in acquisitions unaccounted for than a sudden influx of Japanese greenfield investment.

Half of the Top 30 Japanese employers in Italy are also in the EMEA region top 30, so would be expected to have substantial presence in Italy too. The acquisitions detailed above show that Italy’s strengths, as far as Japanese companies are concerned, are in engineering – particularly rail and air conditioning. Judging by the companies that are only in the Italy Top 30,  textiles (Toray) and pharmaceuticals (CBC and Takeda) are still attractive sectors for Japanese investment – and of course food – such as the Princes tomato processing plant, owned by Mitsubishi Corporation.

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The recent news about Nissan and its Chinese battery manufacturing partner Envision deciding to go ahead with expanding the battery plant in Sunderland, to supply a new electric vehicle model, led me to revisit my researches on trends on the Japanese automotive sector in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. I had blogged in October 2020 that for the first time in at least five years, according to Toyo Keizai data, there were more Japanese automotive manufacturers in Germany than in the UK.

Toyo Keizai’s new directory came out this April, and adding in their more recent data, it seems that the number of Japanese automotive manufacturers in Germany actually dropped by 11, from 31 to 22. So the UK is back in the top spot. Cross checking this against all data for Japanese companies in Germany, it seems that this is more that those 11 companies switched categories rather than left Germany. Many automotive suppliers of parts supply parts for other industries, so they may have decided that the bulk of their business was no longer automotive, or preferred not to be classified as automotive.  There were also falls in the numbers of Japanese automotive manufacturers in Spain, Russia, Poland and Portugal.

The number of people employed by Japanese automotive manufacturers is perhaps a better indicator of general health than self classified numbers of companies. The numbers employed by Japanese automotive manufacturers in the UK has dropped by 12% comparing 2015/6 to 2020/21 and by around 8% over the year 2019/20 to 2020/2021.  I only have comparable employee numbers for the rest of the region for the past two years,  and these show that there has been a 2% drop employee numbers from 2019/20 to 2020/2021. The only other notable decrease was in France, where employment fell by 11%. The most growth was in Morocco, but only by 3%.

So the UK still has the most employees of Japanese automotive manufacturers in the region, but the number of employees has dropped below 30,000 for the first time in five years. The Czech Republic, Germany and Poland are not far behind in terms of employee numbers, and it’s possible Germany still does have more Japanese automotive related manufacturers than the UK, it’s just that they have chosen not to classify themselves as being in the automotive sector. The closure of Honda Swindon and other suppliers to the Swindon plant this month will probably result in the UK losing its top spot both in terms of employees and companies hosted.

The biggest Japanese automotive employers, apart from the actual car assemblers themselves, are the wire harness suppliers- Yazaki and Sumitomo Electric being the dominant Japan owned companies. Unsurprisingly, they base most of their factories in lower labour cost countries in Eastern Europe and North Africa.

Overall, Japanese automotive manufacturers employ around 280,000 people in the region, not including those in the supply chain who are wholesale/importing rather than manufacturing.  So it is no wonder that any investment by them is welcome news, but it may take a little more than the recent Nissan announcement to reverse the trends in the UK and across the region.

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