Japanese business in Europe - Rudlin Consulting

“Japanese companies are weak at the top” – Horiba’s CEO

I was recently asked what Japanese company’s mission statement I most admired and I said Horiba’s “Omoshiro okashiku” which is translated into English as “Joy and Fun” (but the fun also means quirky, or as Horiba says “interesting” which is what I think many Japanese companies are to Western eyes, and that’s a good thing). I know from reports from our consultants in Germany that this ethos is transmitted to the overseas subsidiaries too. This interview with the President of Horiba in Nikkei Business by Higashi Masaki, the Editor, is so interesting, I have not made a precis, rather with big help from Google Translate, have left it pretty much as is.

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Since Horiba Atsushi took office as president, sales have increased more than five times, and overseas employees are now the majority, transforming it into a global company. He has also developed a unique corporate culture, including calling employees “Horibarians” regarding them as part of the family. We asked about Japan’s challenges as seen by companies competing globally in technology development.

(Interviewer: Masaki Higashi, Editor-in-Chief of Nikkei Business)

PROFILE

Atsushi Horiba was born in 1948 in Kyoto Prefecture. After graduating from Konan University Faculty of Science in 1971, he joined Olson Horiba, Inc. of the United States. He then joined HORIBA, Ltd. in 1972. He is also graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of California, USA in 1977. After that, he directed the overseas expansion of the group, and after working as a director in 1982 and managing director in 1988, became president in 1992. He has also served as chairman since 2005. He has been in his current position for18 years. He is also the face of the local business community, such as serving as the vice chairman of the Kansai Economic Federation. He is the eldest son of Masao Horiba, the founder of HORIBA, Ltd.

The automobile industry is greatly affected by the new coronavirus.

It was a difficult time for car makers even without the coronavirus. This is because there is a dramatic switch towards “CASE” (Connected, Autonomous, Sharing, Electric). It is necessary to move from the “hard” industry, which competes through productivity gains to steadily manufacture high-quality cars, to the “light” industry, which has become IT (information technology) intensive. What was a simultaneous equation with one variable has now become treble the pain.

HORIBA has the largest share of car exhaust gas inspection equipment in the world. The main business is conventional car-related products.

Electric vehicles will be the mainstream in urban areas. However, the combustion type will not disappear in areas with harsh climates. Regulations will also become stricter. However, it is not a growing market, so I would like to expand the CASE field.

How to secure human resources is very important. In 2015, we acquired a British company called Mira (which supports the development of automobiles). We wanted the excellent R & D unit of about 600 people, but it also had test equipment related to CASE. Mira’s test track has research bases for automobile manufacturers such as Toyota (automobile) and major parts manufacturers, so tests and research can be done together.

The company motto is “Joy and Fun”, but is that feeling the same even with the coronavirus?

Now more than ever is the time to have “joy and fun”. All managers are at a loss now. Even so, we don’t feel so sad because we are working in various fields under this company motto. “Fun” does not mean “funny” but “interesting”. With that idea, we shifted our direction. It’s not absolute, but I feel that this helps us be responsive.

It is necessary to strike a good balance between being extremely advanced in a specific field and expanding the range in order to foster new businesses?

To be honest, I don’t think this is managed properly. But that’s what’s interesting, and it’s made up of the enthusiasm of each unit. Trust is at the base. For example, if you are studying optics, you can think of many people who would be good to consult with within the company.

It is unreasonable to expect people who are developing the products that are profitable now think about what the future needs will be. There is no Superman in the world. In many cases, human resources are crushed in search of Superman.

What kind of human resources are you looking for?

I often say that I don’t want a guy who has a good memory, that is, a guy who just graduated from a good university with good grades. Some of the students who are considered to be excellent in the world outside join us, but from our point of view, they are also “stupid” children (laughs). I often join in on the quiz shows for highly educated people on TV, but they are just competing for memory and have no sense.

What does ‘sense’ mean?

Whether you are interested. That is, whether you can do “joy and fun” However, if only “sharp angled” human resources are hired, the company will collapse. That is the balance.

In order to maximize the breadth of the business, it is necessary to have an organizational structure for that purpose.

Now, the biggest issue is the wall between each department. In a pyramid-type organization, individual departments do their best, but there is no interface to connect the results. But if the organization is flat, it’s not necessary. It’s in a mixed state. Instead, the person above needs to be a Superman who can figure out where and what is going on (laughs).

Is the solid financial structure with an equity ratio of over 50% also a factor that guarantees the realization of “interesting and funny”?

Companies with weak internal reserves will have a hard time during coronavirus. When it was said that it was bad to retain earnings, I thought that retained earnings should definitely be increased. This is to ensure that opportunities for M & A (merger / acquisition) are not missed. If you have to ask the bank for money, it may be too late and the target is acquired by someone else.

What do you see as the challenges facing the Japanese economy now?

We manufacture all the key products such as detectors, filters and electronic boards in-house. The problem with Japan is that we have go outside to get the basic science for these key products. You cannot apply knowledge if you do not have the basic science. Nevertheless, Japanese industry and academia are only doing applied science.

We have R & D units in France, Germany and the United States because the academia of these countries never let go of the basic science. Not only is China accumulating product know-how, but it is also conducting basic research. China is the best-selling market for the latest optical analyzer developed in France. It’s neither Japan nor the United States. We need to be aware of the fact that China is doing this very thoroughly.

It is a worry that China’s technological capabilities are rising rapidly.

Japan has not lost yet. I just don’t know after 4-5 years where we’ll be. They are thinking very clearly about the combination of academia and industry. The winners and losers in a battle of comprehensive strength are becoming clear. How do you get around this? I don’t like the word “niche,” but we’ve survived because we’ve put more people and money into a specialty than a giant company.

The Japanese, and Japanese technology and schools are excellent. However, various regulations and past shackles are in the way. For example, why does the faculty council have personnel rights even at universities? At Tsinghua University in China, the top management is steadily being replaced with excellent human resources. But in Japan, once you get tenure, you stay in academia until retirement. This is such an unfair situation.

Are there any other obstacles to your competitiveness?

If I weren’t Japanese, I would have headquartered in California, USA, and the company would have been three times as large as it is now. Taxes are high and fixed costs are high in Japan. Our main medical base is located in France because of problems with Japanese regulations. We just pay lip service to “deregulation” and in the meantime Japan declines.

Industry-academia-government must think about industrial policy and decide what to make a strength.

Even if the government and others hold meetings to gather the top executives of large companies, they cannot take the plunge because they have a company. When I first became President I was called by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (currently the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry), and when I talked about what I thought, I wasn’t called on again. The people around me just gave textbook answers.

However, the current Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is different from that time. What is worrisome is that bureaucrats who are trying to reform in line with our opinion tend to be off the career track.

Do they not want to change?

Perhaps they prioritize their own lives rather than the country. The sense of life or death of officials and politicians of the Meiji era is not there. I’m afraid that there is no sense of crisis about the fact that Japan is buying in more and more technology now.

China’s “brain” is talented people educated in the United States. There is no brain in Japan. People who are active (at the forefront) don’t end up leading government councils. Even if the technology and the times change, Japan still has excellent human resources, but they cannot “overtake” the incumbents. It’s the same with the top executives of large companies.

Because the term of office is fixed, the number of “salarymen” in top management has increased.

There is absolutely no business that will produce results in 6 years [the usual stint as President of a Japanese company] after investing from zero. It just means continual losses.

It takes at least two years for our products to be researched, tested, designed and finalized. It will be five years if the basic research is redone. It will take another 2-3 years to make a profit from it. Many things can be done with technology and machines, but this is useless if you do not develop people as well.

When the top executive who started a growth business retires after six years, and that business is making losses, he is said to be the “worst executive”, and when the next top executive harvests from what his predecessor has sown, he is celebrated as “great”. That shouldn’t be the case.

Don’t avoid developing leaders

What does it take to enable top management to think about things in the long run?

Japan is overwhelmingly strong in terms of both technology and human resources. The only weakness is the top. The United States and China are working hard on how to raise the elite. If we don’t train leaders, society won’t progress. On the other hand, in Japan, “elite” is a forbidden concept. In Japan, both politicians and business owners are a disorderly mob.

Japan is in a very dangerous state now. It has become a bogus democracy. True democracy has competition, and everyone is different. In the United States, they first educate elementary school pupils about how different each person is. But in Japan, it’s like “stop it, you’re annoying the old guy.” The responsibility of the media is also heavy.

It’s rare for a person at the top of a listed company to have a beard.

I nearly died of hepatitis when I was about 35 years old. Until then, I was just being the diligent president’s son. But at that time, I thought this is a turning point and I thought I would live a life where I do what I think is best, no matter what others say. My beard is a proof of that. From then on it became a lot easier.

You don’t know what works and how it works.

It feels like God only knows the future (laughs). However, there is a belief that we will make the best decision at that time by listening directly to the stories of people on the front line. I’ve done my best so I can’t help if it doesn’t work. However, people end up worrying about seeking more than the best.

You end up just wanting the correct answer.

The difficulty of management is that there is no correct answer. Everyone has the illusion that there is a correct answer, but there isn’t. The answer will come.

Side note from the interviewer Higashi Masaki

I don’t know if it’s because Japan has become richer or there is more inequality now, but as Mr. Horiba points out, “how individuals live” rather than the desirable way of organizations such as countries and companies should be has become increasingly the priority. It is important to note that the pursuit of personal well-being can sometimes be inconsistent with the interests of the organization.

For example, there is a tendency for top management to change and quickly write off assets of unprofitable businesses to generate a deficit. Then their predecessor has not made a loss, and the successor is certain to recover in a V shape during his term. The rewards for the two executives may be good, but is the timing as an organization optimal? As the mobility of talent increases, the relationship between individuals and organizations can become more difficult.

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Japanese companies need a strong employee brand to attract globally minded employees

I spoke to a group of Japanese managers in London last year on the topic of my last article “I love Japan but I don’t want to work in a Japanese company” – an attitude I have heard from young Europeans who have studied Japanese at university, or worked in Japan for a couple of years on the JET scheme, or simply became fans of Japanese culture through a love of anime and computer games.

They don’t want to work for Japanese companies because they think they won’t have a fun and fulfilling career. They worry that there will be lots of overtime, bureaucracy and an oppressive hierarchy – and that Japanese companies in Europe are mostly dull, engineering sales subsidiaries.

My recommendation to the Japanese managers in the audience was to strengthen the “employee brand” in Europe, to make it more appealing to those young people. Many European veterans of Japanese companies have told me that they like working for Japanese companies because they are different, interesting, quirky, more “human” and long term in orientation rather than the standardised, numbers driven, short termist culture of many Western multinationals. Japanese companies should also offer short term secondments to Japan, so that their non-Japanese graduate hires can build networks and participate in decision-making and so develop their careers.

I realise it is tough for Japanese managers in Europe to ask their Japanese headquarters to adjust their employee brand just to appeal to overseas recruits, when Japan headquarters probably think their priority is to hire the best globally minded Japanese graduates.

So I showed them some research from Japanese recruitment company DISCO’s Caritas Research 2020 survey of Japanese students graduating from foreign and Japanese universities. It illustrates that the needs of Japanese students from foreign universities are similar to those of European students.

Whereas graduates from Japanese universities preferred a job which will provide them a secure lifestyle, would rather work in Japan rather than overseas and to work for one company for a long time, the preference of Japanese graduates of foreign universities was for a job which helped them realise their dreams, paid well, and would prefer to work overseas rather than stay in Japan.

Apart from strengthening the employee brand and offering more attractive career paths, another recommendation I made was that management training was needed for Japanese expatriates in leadership, giving feedback, managing diversity and being inclusive when managing Europeans.

I was of course hoping this would lead to more business for my company, but judging by one of the managers who approached me afterwards, it might not be for the reasons I expected. The managing director said his company was 80% Japanese, but there were big communication gaps between the younger generation and the older, between those who had graduated from foreign universities or lived abroad, and those who had mainly worked, lived and studied in Japan. Clearly Japanese companies are having to adjust to different mindsets amongst Japanese employees too.

A video of Pernille Rudlin’s presentation on this topic is available on the Rudlin Consulting YouTube channel here in English and here in Japanese.

The original version of this article was published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News. Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” is available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

What is the deal with Nissan?

The wave of Japanese investment into UK after NSK’s first step in 1974, feared by many in the UK, did not happen immediately. Under the Labour government of 1974-79, there was double digit inflation, unemployment of over 1 million, the IMF bail out in 1976 and the Winter of Discontent, which may have been something of a disincentive to invest in the British economy. Although NSK did prove correct about a weak sterling, which at least ensured their British made exports were cheap.

Japanese concerns over Britain’s economic, political and social stability did not end with the advent of a Conservative government in 1979, however. It took nearly 3 years of feasibility studies, Mrs Thatcher visiting Tokyo and a visit by Nissan to NSK in Peterlee for reassurance, from the first announcement in January 1981 to when agreement was reached that Nissan could go ahead with building its UK factory in Washington, Sunderland in 1983. There were also predictions by unions and other car manufacturers of “devastation” if Nissan in the UK was just an assembly operation using cheap Japanese components.

“Better for the British people to buy Japanese cars made by British workers than to buy German cars assembled by Turks”

The argument made by Norman Tebbitt, then Secretary of State for Employment in April 1981 that “surely it is better for the British people to buy Japanese cars made by British workers than to buy German cars assembled by Turks” had finally won through domestically, but Nissan had also had its own misgivings which caused the delay – both from its experience in Europe and pressures in Japan from its union.

Nissan had already dipped several toes into manufacturing in Europe. It took a stake in Moto Iberica, Spain‘s largest commercial vehicle manufacturer in 1980. The tractor division was spun off to form a new company, with Kubota taking a 55% stake and assuming managerial control. Nissan took a 67.67% stake in the rest of Motor Iberica, renaming it Nissan Motor Iberica in 1987. Manufacturing of vans and commercial vehicles continued at the plant through to the present – but not always profitably – and finally Nissan announced that it will be shut down in December 2021.

Nissan had also in 1980 started a joint venture with Alfa-Romeo, building a plant in Italy which started production in 1982, marketed as the Alfa Romeo Arna in Italy and Germany, and the Nissan Cherry Europe in the UK. However, this venture was not a success and production was suspended in 1986.

Nissan concluded an agreement with Volkswagen in 1987 to produce and market the Volkswagen Santana in Japan, hoping to counter criticism that the Japanese market was difficult to penetrate. Santana production was terminated in 1989, to be replaced by the Passat. Sales of imported Passats in Japan were so poor, however, Nissan cancelled the assembly agreement.

The 1984 Nissan deal

The Nissan union in Japan had been concerned that the size of the investment in the UK plant meant that funds would be diverted from investment in Japan, and there was no guarantee that the project would be successful. If it failed, it might even affect the security of employment within Japanese factories. Consequently, the scale of the investment was reduced from the initial announcement of a £200-£300 million investment to a two phase project, starting with a pilot plan of a £50 million investment to assemble 24,000 Bluebird cars from knockdown kits imported from Japan. This was justified as being needed to gain first-hand knowledge of operating and marketing in the UK and obtain information on local sourcing of components.

The second phase was to be a build up from 60% local sourcing to 80% by 1991, expanding to a 100,000 units per year capacity, 30-40% of which was to be exported to Continental Europe. The total cost was put at £350 million with the British governement expected to provide selective financial assistance up to 10% of the total investment.

Keeping to the deal in a Single Market

Production of the Bluebird began on schedule in 1986, and the second phase began in 1987. Initially the plant made low value added models with high value-added quality cars exported from Japan, but from 1990 the Primera hatchback was manufactured in Sunderland as the sole global production source, exported back to Japan and into Taiwan. The cost of the Nissan project had risen to about £900 million by the beginning of the 1990s and output rose to 124,000 units per year in 1991.

Whereas around 80% of the components of UK made cars were sourced in the UK when the 1984 Nissan deal was struck, by the 1990s and early 2000s the proportion had dropped to around 30-40%. Even UK components in turn contained components from elsewhere, as this comment from a supplier in the comments section of the Financial Times explains:

“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.”

Even if Nissan did not keep to the local sourcing part of the 1984 deal (presumably superseded by the European Single Market, so that local meant EU wide), they did expand production way beyond the 100,000 promised, peaking at 519,000 units produced in 2016/7. The 470 strong 1986 workforce grew to around 7,000 people by 2019, around 10% of whom were designers and engineers working in a design facility in Cranfield.

Nissan also exceeded its promise of exporting 30-40% of production to Continental Europe. By 2016 nearly 1/3 of UK car production was made by Nissan, 80% exported, 55% to the EU.

Nissan has tried to increase the proportion of locally made parts to 40% and even to 80%, to avoid tariffs and delays in the supply chain after Brexit, supported by a British government policy to reach 50%. It has encouraged suppliers to set up in a new industrial park in the North East in order to do so, but our data does not show any move by Japanese suppliers to increase their UK presence.

In fact the shift seems to be more towards setting up additional factories in Continental Europe. Of the 29 new automotive manufacturing operations started in Europe in 2015-2018, according to the Teikoku Databank and our researches, 8 were in Germany, 4 in France, 4 in Slovakia, 3 in Spain, 3 in Italy, 3 in Hungary and 2 in the Czech Republic but none in the UK. For the first time there are now more Japanese automotive manufacturers in Germany than in the UK.

The 2016 Nissan deal – to Infiniti and beyond

Even if the long term solution to a hard Brexit is to increase the number of automotive suppliers in the UK, some short term shoring up had to be done to ensure that manufacturers didn’t conclude that the safest bet was to shift all supply chains and manufacturing to continental Europe.

Greg Clark, the former Business Secretary, revealed in 2019 that the content of his letter to former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn in October 2016 included “a package of support in areas such as skills, R&D and innovation” which “could amount to additional support of up to £80m”. This was modified to £61m by 2018 due to reduced production costs. It was conditional upon Nissan continuing with plans to manufacture the new X-Trail and a new model Qashqai in the UK. Clark revealed the terms of the letter after Nissan announced that it had decided to manufacture the X-Trail in Japan in 2019, thus invalidating the deal.

There were rumours that the government would therefore pull the aid package, but Business Minister Richard Harrington said in 2019 that the deal would still stand, and be tied to electric vehicle development, which in Nissan’s case would be the LEAF, which only represents around 10% of its production in Sunderland.

Nissan announced in 2019 that it would no longer produce the Infiniti in Sunderland for Western Europe. It was supposed to start production of both the new Qashqai and X-Trail in Sunderland in 2019, then it said it would start the Qashqai production in October 2020, and then announced it will delay the start to mid 2021, due to the uncertainty caused by COVID-19, and – although it did not say this – by what kind of EU-UK deal there might be. Nissan has already spent £400m readying Sunderland for the new Qashqai, supported by £11m from the UK government.

Nissan Next and the alliance

In May 2020 President Uchida Makoto announced Nissan Next, a a four year medium term plan, aiming to downsize and close plants such as Spain and Indonesia. Nissan will focus on “our highly competitive midsize segment, electrification and driver assistance technology” and increase the ratio of common electric parts across the alliance of Mitsubishi, Renault and Nissan. Nissan is seeing the Ariya as its new big hope for electric vehicles after the Leaf. The Leaf was manufactured in Sunderland, whereas the Ariya is being manufactured in Japan.

The three companies also announced the plan for the alliance in May 2020, where each will take the lead in their main sales regions, the models and technologies under development. Nissan is to take the lead as the “reference” for China, North America and Japan. Renault will be the reference for Europe, Russia, South America and North Africa and Mitsubishi in ASEAN and Oceania. Renault has already said it would be willing to manufacture Nissan cars in its European factories if needs be, and presumably if there is a no deal Brexit and/or lack of diagonal cumulation whereby Japanese parts are not accepted as “British” by the EU, then Renault can help out Nissan in terms of sourcing EU parts.

Clark’s 2016 letter promised to Ghosn it would “be a critical priority of our negotiation to support UK car manufacturers and ensure that their ability to export to and from the EU is not adversely affected by the UK’s future relationship with the EU”. Clark and Ghosn are both gone, so it’s unsurprising, 4 years’ on, Nissan feels the need for more reassurance that the UK government will keep to their side of the deal, whatever that turns out to be this time. If not, Renault is waiting in the wings.

Should Japanese companies be compensated by the British government for Brexit?

There has been some talk of whether Japanese companies who invested in the UK might seek compensation from the UK government, should the UK leave the EU in such a way as to materially damage their investments.

To understand the basis for such a claim, we need to travel back to the early 1970s to understand what lay behind Japanese manufacturing investment in the UK, and what promises were made. Japan had recovered from the devastation of WWII to become a successful economy and trading nation.

The oil crisis of 1973 revealed, however, that Japan was a nation that had to keep pedalling to stay on the bicycle. Over 90% of its oil was imported and 70% of its energy needs depended on oil. Exports were a means to buy this essential import, but agressive exporting had led to trade friction with western Europe and the USA.

Investing in manufacturing bases abroad was one way to mitigate this friction and the USA, Asia and Latin America were the main beneficiaries of this from the 1950s, with western Europe joining rather later.

The UK had just become a member of the European Economic Community, and the British government was looking at ways to give regional support to areas in the North East where coal, steel, shipbuilding and heavy engineering were in decline. The North of England Development Council opened one of the first UK regional offices in Japan in 1975 to attract inward investment.

NSK – one of the first Japanese manufacturers to invest in the UK

The first major automotive related manufacturing investment in the UK was by NSK (Nippon Seiko Kaisha), Japan’s leading ball bearings and steering column manufacturer, in 1974. NSK had begun a feasibility study of European production in 1971 and considered other locations such as Ireland and the Netherlands, all of whom offered generous aid and grants. In the end the UK was chosen because of proximity of supply industries, cultural similarities, moderate industrial relations and the view that sterling would be weak over the long term.

Although NSK’s investment in the UK was supported by the Minister for Industrial Development, Chris Chataway, the UK bearing industry sought assurances regarding the threat posed by Japanese competition. The joint communique promoted reciprocal investment in Britain and Japan, although there is no record of British ball bearing investment in Japan happening since. Instead NSK ended up acquiring the main British competitor, United Precision Industries in 1990, in addition to establishing a £7 million factory in Peterlee, County Durham, employing 220 people, which began production in 1976.

The 1974 deal was that NSK should invest in an assisted area, and at least one half of the output should exported, with one half of the value of the product to be added in Britain, and that there should be considerable substitution of the current Japanese imports of bearings. Chataway pointed out that it was “better for Britain that we should have investment in the UK serving the European market, rather than investment in Europe, from where the goods would be exported to Britain”.

The official reasons for choosing Peterlee were given by NSK as being the availability of skilled labour and a good factory site and a good communications network and local amenities. Government grants and loans of £1.4 million were also provided.

46 years later, NSK has to stockpile

Rolling on 46 years, NSK Bearings Europe now employs over 900 people in factories in Peterlee and Newark. It acts as a contract manufacturer to NSK Europe Ltd, with a turnover of over 1 billion euros, which sells 14% of its production to the UK and 70% to the EU, to the automotive and industrial sectors. NSK has had anti-dumping duties imposed on it by the EC but an EC investigation into it found that less than 60% of imported parts were used in its finished bearings, so it was cleared of being a “screwdriver” operation. So NSK has kept its side of the bargain.

NSK acquired Amatsuji in Japan (AKS Precision Ball in the UK) and expanded further in Europe – with factories in Poland and Germany as well as sales subsidiaries across the Continent. It has stockpiled on the assumption that there will be a no deal Brexit. If there is a no deal Brexit, the standard third country tariff on bearings is 8%.

So, although NSK’s investment deal was done over 40 years’ ago, a no deal Brexit would mean that the UK government has chosen to put a large obstacle in the way to NSK fulfilling the promise of that investment deal to export more than half of its UK production. It would be understandable if NSK felt this invalidated its commitment to invest in the UK. Presumably this kind of issue is why Japan has asked for some kind of investor state dispute mechanism to be put in place between Japan and the UK.

This post draws heavily on ‘Japan and the North East of England: From 1862 to the Present Day’, Marie Conte-Helm, The Athlone Press, 1989 and ‘Japanese Manufacturing Investment in Europe: Its impact on the UK Economy’, Roger Strange, Routledge, 1993.

Top 10 Japanese corporate charity donors in the UK

Japan-owned companies in the UK contributed over £17 million to charity in 2019. £10 million of this, however, was the donation made by First Sentier Investments (formerly First State Investments), owned by Japan’s MUFG Group since 2019.

£8.5m of the £10m went to the Maitri Trust which was established by the Stewart Investors team members (part of First Sentier Investments) in 2006, and helps educational initatives in India, South Africa and Mexico. The other £1.5m was given to the Charities Aid Foundation. 2019’s donation was a substantial increase on the £5.5m First Sentier donated in 2018.

The biggest Japanese corporate donors (>£100,000) increased their charitable budgets over the past two years, but overall the total dropped 3% on a like for like basis (not including First Sentier as they were not Japan owned in 2018/9).

Benchmarking Japanese corporate charitable donations

It’s difficult to benchmark Japanese companies’ charitable activities in the UK against FTSE 100 companies as many of the Japanese companies in the UK operate on a regional or global basis and the charitable donations are on that basis too. Only around 10% of the 1000 or so Japanese companies in the UK put a monetary figure on their charitable donations in their annual reports, or specifically state that they do not donate to charity.

The Charities’ Aid Foundation issued a report in 2018 on FTSE 100 charitable donations, which estimated that the FTSE 100 donated around £1.9bn in 2016. The report uses donations as a percentage of pre tax profit as a benchmark. Unfortunately some of the biggest Japanese companies in the UK such as Toyota, Nomura and Dentsu have been making losses in recent years so this is not a benchmark which can be readily applied to them. However, CAF’s cut off point of “at least 1% of pre-tax profits” as being an indication of commitment to charitable giving means that it is possible to say that JTI, Dentsu (using 2018 figures), Mitsubishi Corporation, Fujitsu Services and Ricoh are all in the “above 1%” category.

The Top 10 Japanese corporate givers

The next biggest donor after First Sentier was Japan Tobacco International through their Gallaher subsidiary in the UK. They donated £3.24m in 2019, a similar level to 2018. Gallaher “works with leading charities to improve the lives of socially isolated older people as well as those who are homeless, disabled or excluded from society in other ways”. They have a UK Community Investment Programme which has been accredited with Business in the Community’s CommunityMark. Employees have an allowance of up to 6 days’ a year to get involved in community fund raising and volunteering.

The third largest Japanese corporate donor was advertising and marketing group Dentsu Aegis Network, (soon to be rebranded as Dentsu International) whose global headquarters are in London. They donated £1m to charity (£0.9m in 2018) – but this is likely to be a worldwide, excluding Japan total. Dentsu announced in 2017 that “Society” was now one of its official stakeholders and announced a new social purpose of a digital economy for all. They are aiming to reach a billion people with sustainable development goal led campaigns and support 100 female founded businesses. They are launching a digital skills initiative to support 100,000 people to improve their skills.

Close behind are Toyota Motor Manufacturing UK, who donated £0.9m in 2019, slightly down on the previous year of £0.95m. It “seeks to support good causes in the areas local to its manufacturing operations” [Burnaston in Derbyshire and Deeside]. It has a charitable trust that makes donations in the areas of road safety, social inclusion and deprivation and health. As well as fund raising it makes in kind donations of cars, parts and volunteering hours (included in the £9.08m). Its nominated charity of the year was the Derbyshire, Leicestershire & Rutland and Wales Air Ambulance Service.

Mitsubishi Corporation donated £267,000 in 2019/20 (up from £140,000 in 2018/19) – to the British Museum , the Earthwatch Fellowship Programme, the University of Cambridge Faculty of East Asian Studies, the UK-Japan Music Society and the Mitsubishi Corporation Fund for Europe and Africa, which engages with partner organisations in environmental conservation.

Hitachi Capital donated £250,000 (up from £200,000 in the previous year) in 2019/20. Their national charity partner is FareShare which redistributes food going to waste to charities and community groups – contributing to the sustainable development goal of “no poverty”. Hitachi Capital staff also volunteer at FareShare. The group also works with Young Enterprise and The Wildlife Trust.

Nomura established The Nomura Charitable Trust in 2009, “supporting disadvantaged young people in the local communities in which it operates through both grant making and employee engagement in the form of volunteering and other engagement initiatives.” It gave £235,659 to 11 charities which aligned with the objectives of the trust and were recommended by Nomura employees in the year ending March 2019.

Eisai, the Japanese pharmaceutical company with a factory in Hatfield donated £212,000 in 2018/9, up from £116,00 in 2017/8. Around half of this was to patient organisations such as Alzheimer’s Research UK and Breast Cancer Now, according to their “Transparency” page on their website.

In 2018/9 Fujitsu raised over £200,000 for its partner charity Macmillan Cancer Support as well as 5,500 volunteer hours spent by employees volunteering and skill sharing.

The Olympus KeyMed group via KeyMed (Medical and Industrial Equipment Ltd) gave £122,621 within the UK, of which £45,905 was to healthcare charities, £40,202 was to “other”, £33,856 was to cancer charities and £2,658 to children’s charities. This represented a 10% decrease on the previous year

Ricoh UK made £110,426 in charitable donations in 2019, a significant increase on the previous year’s £66,285. The sum represents both financial and in kind, providing products and people to support charitable activities.

The others

Many of the larger Japanese companies in the UK not mentioned above do contribute to charities but do not put a price tag on this in their annual reports. Nissan Motor Manufacturing, for example, launched a Days for Change Europe wide programme where employees can take days “off” to volunteer. Kwik Fit, owned by Japanese trading company Itochu announced in 2019 that its charity partner was Children with Cancer UK, and a target of £1m to be raised through its sponsorship of the British Touring Car Championship.

Hitachi Rail says it made no charitable donations in 2019, seemingly leaving this up to its employees, who raised £156,846 for the Railway Children charity “to date.”

Canon UK describes its “social value policy” as comprising “employability skills training, education support, community and charitable activities” but goes into no further detail.

Conclusions

Japanese executives who had lived in the UK have occasionally remarked to me how many charity shops there are in the UK and how often they are approached by their employees to help with fundraising initiatives. According to Charities’ Aid Foundation, the UK is number 6 in the world in terms of individual charitable giving (money and time), after Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, USA and Ireland. Japan is at 128 but in 6th position in terms of the number of people who volunteer time for charitable causes.

Certainly I remember when living in Japan and working for Mitsubishi Corporation that there were plenty of opportunities to get involved in volunteering via the company. Conversely, to my relief, noone ever asked me to sponsor them to take a charity ramen bath. I have vivid memories of being in a group of employees who took severely disabled people to Tokyo Disneyland. National disasters such as the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami also saw thousands of employees of various companies giving up weeks on end to go to the region to help.

Those Japanese companies who do give substantial amounts of money to charity in the UK tend either to have acquired established British companies and therefore their legacy of charitable activity (JTI, Dentsu, Fujitsu, Olympus KeyMed) or are manufacturers employing large numbers of staff and looking for ways to engage with the local community such as Toyota, Eisai and Ricoh. In many cases, the decision makers will also be local executives looking to raise the brand profile in a globally appealing way, so a specifically “Japanese” flavoured proposition may not be of great interest unless part of their corporate purpose is to represent Japanese interests abroad.

There are plenty of funds in Japan set up by companies such as Toshiba, Honda, Panasonic (Matsushita) but these tend to be educational in orientation and more in the business of awarding prizes, scholarships and research grants. Japanese companies will sometimes endow foundations overseas (Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies at Oxford, Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation) which are also educational and dispense scholarships and grants.

Anyone wishing to approach Japanese companies may need to bear these differences and distinctions in mind. For local giving, it will be necessary to win over the local employees, and for large, prestigious donations, much of the funding available may be controlled from Japan.

“I love Japan but I don’t want to work in a Japanese company”

Japan is more popular than ever amongst young Europeans, who have become familiar with it through anime and manga, or love of Japanese food. Yet “securing human resources” continues to be the key operational challenge for Japanese companies operating in Europe, according to JETRO’s annual survey.

Young people love the playful popular culture of Japan but they assume that this is not going to be the Japan they will experience if they join an engineering and manufacturing oriented Japanese company.

A more serious reason for not wanting to join a Japanese company is the lack of career development opportunities, when it looks like top management reserved for Japanese only. The larger Japanese companies have made efforts to overcome this by having European or global graduate recruitment and training programmes, often involving spending time in Japan.

I suspect it is the medium to small sized Japanese companies who are having the hardest time recruiting the people they need. Their European operations are still basically sales arms of the Japan headquarters. This means when they hire qualified engineers, they are disappointed that the job is more sales than engineering in content.

Japanese companies in Western Europe are most in need of management personnel but are facing already high labour costs. Japanese companies in Central and Eastern Europe are most in need of factory workers and cite the rapid growth of labour costs as their biggest operational challenge. Presumably they are having to compete with better known Western companies who are also facing a tight labour market. The obvious solution is to offer higher salaries, but that of course undermines the economic rationale of have manufacturing in Central and Eastern Europe.

Rather than engage in a price war for scarce management or technical staff, Japanese companies need to offer something different and attractive, which brings us back to the Japanese popular culture loved by young Europeans.

I was surprised recently that the European participants in my seminar who were 15+ year veterans of a Japanese technology company listed “the eccentric, child-like mindset” as one of the positives of working in a Japanese company. My 17-year-old son also noticed this on his first trip to Japan with me last month – and happily joined in by buying a Pokemon Piplup plushy and a Shiba dog pencil case which now have pride of place amongst his philosophy, maths and economics textbooks.

“Strengthening the company’s brand” was the top initiative selected for selling products and services in Europe in the JETRO survey. But this should be less about advertising to customers, and more about having an employee brand that appeals to young people. They will then be able to see a future for themselves where they make, design, manage or sell on behalf of a Japanese company, and have fun at the same time.

A video of Pernille Rudlin’s presentation on this topic is available on the Rudlin Consulting YouTube channel here in English and here in Japanese.

Pork for cars and a fog lamp

As the UK-Japan Free Trade Agreement is in its final stages, it seems a good moment to revisit our Top 30 Japanese companies in the UK. Although the headlines seem to be heading towards “pork for cars”, the most important win-win for the UK and Japan should be protecting Japan’s investments in the UK. Japanese companies employ around 170,000 people in the UK by our estimates, and many thousands more indirectly.

The EU-UK deal is still the biggest source of concern for Japanese companies

There is a limit to what the UK-Japan deal can do to protect those investments, however. For Japanese companies in the UK, the EU-UK trade deal is the bigger source of concern. Many of them have their regional headquarters in the UK or have invested in the UK as their base for exporting to the rest of Europe.

The shape (or non-existence) of a UK-EU trade deal will determine not only whether it is worth continuing with manufacturing in the UK for Japanese companies but also whether Japanese companies will continue to coordinate services regionally out of the UK such as finance, legal, IT, HR, engineering, R&D etc. These services account for why the UK has a trade surplus in services exports to Japan – it’s largely due to Japan HQ sending money to their UK based regional operations to fund professional support services needed both for acquisitions and day to day operations.

If the barriers between the UK and the EU to mutual regulatory recognition and movement of people become too high to run European operations from the UK effectively, and as a consequence UK companies are no longer attractive investment targets, Japanese regional HQs and acquisitions will begin to drift to the continent. In fact, they already have started to shift piecemeal to the EU. No amount of bilateral recognition of services and data regulations between the UK and Japan is going to help stem this.

According to our estimates, the number of people employed by Japanese companies in the UK levelled off comparing 2018/9 to 2017/8 – rising by only 0.2% to 170,187, having risen around 6% a year in the previous two years.

Japanese automotive sector dominates Japanese jobs in UK, but is declining

Our Top 30 Japanese employers in the UK employment total has also levelled out at around 94,000 or 55% of the 170,000 people employed by Japanese companies in the UK.

Nissan (#1), Honda (#5) and Toyota (#8) employ around 18,400 – 11% or so of the total. If other Japanese automotive suppliers are added such as Denso (#20) and Unipres (#30), the total number employed is 37,489 (22% of the total employed by Japanese companies), down 2.8% on 2017/8.

Making sure that there are tariff free automotive components from Japan for manufacturing in the UK will help sustain Japanese manufacturing in the UK at least in the short term, if tariffs are imposed on EU automotive imports as part of the UK-Japan FTA or there’s a no deal. But the shift in automotive production to eastern Europe has been going on for some time.

Japanese trading companies growing steadily in the UK but no acquisitions

The UK, or more especially London, has been the commercial and trading location of choice for Japanese companies in Europe for over 100 years. At the heart of this are Japan’s trading companies – Mitsubishi Corporation, Mitsui & Co, Sumitomo Corporation, Itochu, Marubeni and Sojitz. They are still involved in commodity trading but also financing and more recently acquisitions – although there have not been any UK acquisitions since 2017. The most notable recent European acquisition was Mitsubishi Corporation acquiring Dutch energy company Eneco in 2019 for €4.1bn.

Japanese trading companies currently employ around 14,700 people in the UK, and this has grown just under 2% a year over the past couple of years

Japanese financial services holding steady in the UK

The next biggest Japanese sector in the UK is financial services, including MS&AD (#15), MUFG (#16), Nomura (#17), SMFG (#22), Mizuho (#29). It accounts for around 13,000 employees and growth has been around 1% to 2% a year.

All Japanese financial services companies that are impacted by Brexit have set up or strengthened their subsidiaries in the EU, but the scale of these organisations is still far smaller than their UK operations. There may be an issue eventually not so much about the quantity as the quality of these EU subsidiaries for the EU – they will want to see the decision makers based in the EU as a condition for regulatory approval. But as most decisions are ultimately made by multiple people in Japan headquarters, it is not clear how Japanese companies can respond to such a demand. In the meantime, Japanese financial groups are repositioning their London operations as EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) headquarters.

Electronics, ICT and acquisitions

Fujitsu (#3), the pioneer of big acquisitions in the UK (ICL in 1990) is no longer the biggest Japanese employer in the UK, having shrunk its workforce by 38% since 2014/5. Sony (#9) has also cut its workforce by 11% over the past four years. Canon (#12) and Ricoh (#7) have grown by less than 10%, Brother (#28) grew around 15%, Mitsubishi Electric (#27) by 17%. Konica Minolta (#24) has grown over 40% in the past 4 years through acquisitions but seems to be shifting more towards the Czech Republic recently.

NTT (#11) and Hitachi (#2), both with ex Japan global HQ in the UK, have grown 60% and 175% respectively over the past 4 years, partly through acquisitions but also in Hitachi’s case through organic growth, with the investment in the rail manufacturing and assembly plant in Newton Aycliffe.

Other new entrants over the past four years have been through acquisitions too – Outsourcing (#26) in recruitment, Sumitomo Rubber (#19) through its acquisition of Micheldever in 2017 and SoftBank acquiring (and soon to be disposing of) ARM.

A holding pattern until the fog clears

The years of double digit growth and acquisitions by Japanese companies in the UK seems to be coming to an end, or at least is on hold until the picture is clearer after the fog lifts from the UK-EU negotiations and the coronavirus pandemic. The UK-Japan FTA does not clear this fog, but at least lays out a path for the UK, which Japan very much would like it to follow, of reintegrating itself back into the rules based international order, towards joining the CPTPP and continuing to be one of Japan’s closest allies in terms of digital security and strategic interests.

Japanese companies in the UK

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Time for a logistics revolution in Europe

(This article was published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in November 2018, but it seems even more relevant now)

Now I am back working in my home office, I have become much more conscious of the activities in the street in front of my office window. Once a week, a massive, noisy refrigerated lorry backs itself up against my house, to deliver food to the Italian restaurant three doors down from me. The lorry comes from a food wholesaler with depots the nearest of which is 300km away.

The reason the lorry parks right outside my house is that there are vehicles blocking the road outside the restaurant, caused by the building works which are converting offices into 50 student apartments. Huge trucks reverse up our 16^th century street, damaging the ancient buildings, in order to deliver 50 sets of kitchen or bathroom units. I realise it is cheaper to deliver 50 bathroom units at once in a big truck, but actually the builders did not need all those units at once, as they were fitting out the apartments in phased batches.

When I heard a loud howling noise just after I woke up at around 6:45 one morning I thought it was from the building site again, but it turned out to be from an even bigger refrigerated lorry making deliveries to a chain restaurant in the square at the end of our street.

Chain restaurants have had a bad year in the UK – shutting down a third of their outlets in some cases. Many of these chains are owned by private equity firms, who saw a way to scale up a small chain of restaurants with a distinctive brand into a much bigger, national chain, and reduce costs through bulk purchasing.

The decline of these chain restaurants is partly to do with the economy, but also that the quality of food deteriorated as they expanded. The cooking had become reheating days’ old readymade ingredients.

The quality of the food and the impact on the environment could be improved by more frequent deliveries, in smaller, eco-friendly trucks. Most trucks in Europe run on diesel, and although diesel produces less CO2 than petrol, a huge concern now across Europe is the air pollution diesel causes. French and British governments are banning petrol and diesel cars (but not trucks) from 2040 as a consequence.

But this will require governments to invest much more in electric vehicle charging points and a revolution in logistics. Cities might need to set up hubs in their outskirts for consolidation of deliveries per customer into smaller electric trucks. Logistics companies will need to work with AI specialists like the British company Prowler, whose software is used in logistics to optimise decision making amongst multiple agents.

I realised Japanese companies could be part of this revolution when I saw in my neighbourhood a small electric truck (Isuzu – partly owned by Itochu) belonging to a British tyre wholesaler (owned by Itochu), quietly make a delivery to the city centre outlet of a UK-wide garage chain (also owned by Itochu).

The original version of this article was published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News and can also be found in “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

Are Japanese companies leaving the UK because of Brexit yet?

I asked this question just over a year ago and the answer is still yes and no. To which I would add, it’s more a case that Japanese companies aren’t investing in or coming to the UK as much as they used to, replacing the ones that are leaving or downsizing.

Asia continues to dominate as location for Japanese companies overseas

The number of Japanese companies overseas is, according to Toyo Keizai*, continuing to increase – up 65% from 2008, but the rate of increase has been slowing since 2013. The number of Japanese companies overseas grew 2% from 2018 to 2019, with growth in all regions – higher growth in Africa/Oceania (from a small base) but only 1% growth in Europe compared to 3% in North America and Asia.

63% of Japanese companies overseas are in ex-Japan Asia – up from 62% in 2018 and 69% of the employees of Japanese companies abroad are in Asia. Around 15% of Japanese companies abroad are in Europe and 14% in North America, with both regions having around 11% of employees. As pointed out last year, the obvious factor in why there are proportionately more employees to number of companies in Asia compared to Europe and North America is the greater number of manufacturing operations in Asia, with larger workforces.

The number of UK employees of Japanese companies has fallen for the first time, by 9%

Within Europe, the number of people employed by Japanese companies rose 18% from 2015 to 2019. Those countries where the number of Japanese company employees has fallen are countries where there has been a rise in populism, civic unrest and political risk. UK employee numbers fell 9% 2018-9 (the first decline since at least 2015), Spanish employee numbers fell 19% 2018-9, Hungary’s fell 18%, Turkey’s 10%, Poland and Italy also showed small decreases in employee numbers.

Countries where Japanese employee numbers are growing are the Netherlands (up 11% 2018-9), France (10%), Germany (2%) and the Czech Republic (2%). Employee numbers in Romania doubled from 2018-9 but this is largely due to Toyo Keizai recording employee numbers at Alcedo (acquired by Sumitomo Corporation in 2011) as being 20,284, having been 318 in 2018. The 2018 number is more in line with other available data.

Number of Japanese companies in UK has fallen for first time

The number of Japanese companies in the UK has fallen by 1% 2018-9, from 972 to 966, the first drop since at least 2015, having risen 11% 2015-2018. France also saw a 2% drop in the number of Japanese companies, even though employee numbers are up. Germany attracted a 4% increase in Japanese companies from 2018-9, having risen 13% 2015-8. Netherlands had a 1% increase 2018-9 (13.5% 2015-8) and Italy had a 2% rise in Japanese companies 2018-9, and an increase of 11.8% 2015-8.

It’s hard to work out where Toyo Keizai derives the net drop of 6 Japanese companies in the UK from. Their list of the 7 companies which have closed down in the UK 2019 shows that this was mainly due to reorganization of holding companies or merging of companies rather than full withdrawal from the UK. Of the 8 new Japanese companies in the UK in 2019, 5 were indirect investments into energy companies by Nippon Koei, a civil engineering company and 2 were indirect investments by WDI, a Hong Kong originated Dim Sum chain which is registered in Japan.

Germany now hosts more Japanese automotive companies than the UK

The Japanese automotive sector is of course the sector being most carefully watched for Brexit impact. Japanese automotive manufacturers are continuing to set up overseas – the total number globally has increased 10% in 2019 on 2015. And “despite” the EU-Japan EPA, 15 more Japanese transportation equipment manufacturers set up in Europe in 2019, a 20% cumulative increase on 2015. Of the 15 new companies, 4 are in Germany, 3 in Poland, 2 in Spain, 2 in Portugal, 1 in France, 1 in Italy, 1 in Slovakia and 1 mystery one. This means Germany now hosts more automotive/transportation equipment companies than the UK – 31 to the UK’s 30.

Japanese acquisitions of UK companies reduced in scale and number

Toyo Keizai’s data is reliant on companies filling in their surveys, so tends to underreport and often misses acquisitions. From my database, I estimate 20 British companies were acquired by Japanese companies in 2019-2020, although some of them were indirect acquisitions through acquiring a parent company with a subsidiary in the UK. Dentsu and Sony continued to acquire UK based companies, and other acquisitions were of British companies in software, gaming, hotels, seafood, recruitment, a manufacturer of drives for electric motors and paper wholesale. The scale is far less than in previous years, both in terms of numbers of acquisitions and value of the deals.

Even adding these acquisitions in shows a 3% drop in the number of people employed by Japanese companies in the UK from 2018/9 to 2019/20 according to my database – the first drop since I started tracking these numbers in 2015.

* Toyo Keizai Data Bank: Directory of Japanese Companies Abroad 2020

UK’s priority in Japan trade agreement is not increasing exports, it’s protecting Japan’s investments in UK

My view on Brexit was that it was accelerating trends that were already there for Japanese business in Europe, and gave them cover to do things they were already wanting to do.

The COVID-19 pandemic seems set to provide similar cover and if the UK is not careful, this will mean a further withdrawal of Japanese investment from the UK.

Japanese companies are still in search of growth outside the ageing, declining population of the Japanese market, and this includes in Europe. According to Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs data, the number of Japanese companies in Europe grew 16% from 2012-2018 and the number of Japanese nationals in Europe also grew over the same period by 12%.

At the same time Japanese companies are very risk averse. Brexit was seen as a risk from around 2013 onwards, and this is reflected in the number of Japanese companies and nationals in UK falling by 11% and 7% respectively over 2012-2018 – the only country in Europe to show such significant decreases. Germany already hosts more Japanese companies than the UK and is catching up in terms of hosting Japanese nationals too.

Although Japan is still more of a manufacturing, exporting nation than the UK is, both the UK and Europe are just as – if not more – important to Japan as a destination for investment than as a market for exports of finished goods. As the DIT itself estimates, around 59% of Japanese exports to the UK are intermediate goods, used in supply chains. So in other words, a large number of Japan’s investments in the UK and the Europe boost Japanese exports to the UK and Europe.

The trends in current Japanese trade and investment in Europe and the UK need to be examined for their impact in the four areas where Japan has influence over the UK economy

1. Existing UK jobs reliant on Japanese companies

The Japanese automotive sector is a key source of existing jobs for the UK as it accounts for around a quarter of the 163,000 people I estimate are employed in the UK by Japanese companies. There was a 3% decline from 2017/8 to 2018/9 in employment in the Japanese automotive sector in the UK, however, whereas employment in Japanese automotive companies grew elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe.

So while zero tariffs on automotive parts from Japan to the UK will help – this might just be trying to hold back the tide. The possibility of tariffs on exports of cars made in the UK to the EU is obviously a concern for Japanese companies too. Maybe sterling will fall far enough or there will be sufficient government subsidies to mitigate this extra cost but ultimately Japanese companies will choose to manufacture where there they can access not just the lowest costs but also a market sufficiently large to ensure full production capacity.

Obviously there is a strong need to focus on electric vehicle development, and the UK has strength in automotive design, but Japanese car manufacturers will be wanting to develop EVs in line with EU regulations and to be able to influence EU regulations – which is easier done from inside the EU than outside.

2. Where the new Japanese jobs are in the UK

Hitachi is the most significant recent contributor to organic job growth in Japanese companies in the UK – largely due to Hitachi Rail. Hitachi has also invested in Horizon Nuclear Power, which is currently “on ice”. Hitachi’s focus is on social infrastructure, and various commitments by UK governments on investing in transportation and energy are key to this. Many other Japanese companies are also interested in social infrastructure business in Europe.

A UK Japan trade agreement can support further job growth by facilitating the export of parts for these industries from Japan. Hitachi has also invested in rail manufacturing in Italy so if there are any tariffs making exports from the UK to the EU uncompetitive, they have an alternative manufacturing location within the EU.

Other Japanese companies that are expanding in the UK include NTT, the ICT/telecommunications giant, who have put their non-Japan global HQ in London and SoftBank, who acquired ARM and committed to expand the workforce. Presumably this is why DIT is emphasizing free data flows between Japan and the UK, which would be welcomed by Japanese ICT companies and Japanese regional headquarter functions based in the UK.

I’m seeing some positive impacts of the EU-Japan EPA on investment elsewhere in Europe. There have been quite a few acquisitions by Japanese companies of food businesses in France for example. Japanese trade statistics show that food and alcohol exports to Japan from Europe have risen after the EPA came into force. If a similar agreement on food, textiles and leather goods to the EU Japan EPA is reached between Japan and the UK as the DIT is asking, there may be similar acquisitions by Japanese companies in the UK – as well as the growth in exports for UK SMEs that the DIT seems to be focusing on. There already have been a few food related acquisitions by Japanese companies in the UK. This might see some increase in new jobs in the UK as a result. But this is marginal compared to the jobs that could be created by Japanese investment in the UK infrastructure sector.

3. UK exports of services to Japan are M&A driven

It seems likely that Japanese companies will continue to use their piled-up cash to acquire – perhaps in Asia initially as it is opening up first after COVID-19. In the past, Japan established companies in the UK as gateway to EU but recent Japanese acquisitions in the UK have been increasingly pure domestic (recruitment, car parking, outsourcing, advertising) or pure global (SoftBank, financial services).

These acquisitions do not necessarily create more jobs, but financial, legal and other services around the acquisitions is, I would guess, a large component of UK services exports to Japan. Allowing UK professionals to operate in Japan is not a key driver – it is more that UK based professionals are supporting Japanese companies in Europe and globally. I even know of one UK based, American owned advertising agency that deals directly with the Japan HQ of a Japanese sports brand on their global campaigns, even though the advertising agency have a Japanese office.

Japanese companies may well buy up more British companies in the near future, as they will be cheap. However, there does seem to be a decline in big ticket acquisitions in the UK – the most recent major European acquisition by a Japanese company that I am aware of is Mitsubishi Corporation acquiring the Dutch Energy company ENECO – my understanding is that Netherlands based services companies mainly supported this.

4. Export of services because of UK as European/EMEA hub

Another element in the UK’s export of services to Japan is that the UK subsidiaries of Japanese companies often perform a regional headquarters function for Japanese firms – and receive management fees for this. Brexit (but also changes in Japanese laws on treatment of offshore profits) has caused some Japanese companies to move their regional HQ from UK (Panasonic, Sony) in a legal and financial sense. But there is still a critical mass of people in the UK working for such companies, because the UK provides marketing, IT, design, engineering, legal, financial, accounting services that are of a high, globally accepted standard.

This is why, as the JETRO survey of 2019 of Japanese companies in Europe pointed out, the biggest regulatory concern of Japanese companies is that the UK or the EU might change regulations regarding the freedom of movement between the UK and EU for their employees. Continuing that regional coordination role requires regional employees to move around the region – or can this all now be done by web conferencing?

The UK is still seen by Japan as an attractive place to send students but also employees for education and development. Japanese students only want short term, under 1 year courses, however and many are looking at cheaper, nearer options. Both students and Japanese professionals would want ease of acquiring visas, including work visas and a safe, stable environment to live in.

UK offensive interests

Looking at the recent DIT paper on the UK-Japan FTA, clearly there are some non-tariff barriers to the UK accessing the Japanese market – as there have been for decades. But my overwhelming impression is that most British companies have not been very proactive in approaching the Japanese market – it’s a big commitment, opening an office in Japan is needed, not just exporting from afar. It’s relatively easy to set up a company in Japan but not so easy to hire the right people. There is a labour shortage, particularly of capable salespeople who are English speakers. This is not something that can be solved in a trade agreement.

A final point regarding the DIT paper’s claim that the UK is a “technology superpower” – not in Japanese eyes I’m afraid – possibly in fintech and there have been some Japanese investments in that sector in the UK. But they’re fairly small scale. Japanese technology companies such as Panasonic are basing their innovation arms in Silicon Valley. The US, China and the EU are more important to Japan than the UK – in many ways.