Rudlin Consulting

Category: Japanese business in Europe

  • The successes and failures of Japan’s era of big overseas acquisitions

    The successes and failures of Japan’s era of big overseas acquisitions

    The era of Japan’s big overseas acquisitions began with domestic mega M&As in the 1990s according to Nikkei Business magazine.  Following the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble in 1990, a wave of M&As happened in the financial sector, giving birth to Mizuho from Fuji Bank, Daiichi Kangyo and the Industrial Bank of Japan and Sumitomo Bank and Sakura Bank producing SMBC. In the steel sector with NKK merging with Kawasaki Steel and becoming JFE and in the pharmaceuticals sector with Yamanouchi and Fujisawa merged to become Astellas.

    The key concept for these M&As in the 1990s was “restructuring” – to rationalise the back office and integrate R&D. Then in the second half of the 2000s came a wave of overseas acquisitions, to counter the business impact of the shrinking, ageing population of Japan by growing overseas but also to benefit from further restructuring and rationalisation.

    Mega overseas acquisitions of the 2000s

    In 2007 Japan Tobacco acquired the UK’s Gallaher from RJR, becoming the third biggest tobacco company in the world. In 2006 SoftBank acquired Vodafone Japan and then the US company Sprint Nextel, then British ARM Holdings in 2016. Takeda acquired US Millennium Pharmaceuticals in 2008, then Swiss Nycomed in 2011, with the biggest M&A ever by a Japanese company, acquiring Ireland’s Shire in 2019.

    “Growing overseas means the development of our human resources has become an urgent necessity” said the President of Takeda in 2006, Yasuchika Hasegawa. Hasegawa  was seen as “an alien from outerspace” for his dry, rational management style, arising from many years working in the USA.  Although Takeda had been the biggest pharmaceutical company in Japan for some years, it only ranked around 17 in the world before its acquisition spree and urgently needed to find new drug development sources. It felt it was lagging competitors.

    The need for global management skills

    Hasegawa decided to globalise the company internally by recruiting a foreign successor to himself in 2014 – Christophe Weber from GlaxoSmithKline.  Three out of the seven current Takeda directors are not Japanese.

    Japan Tobacco‘s managers sent overseas after the Gallaher acquisition found themselves caught between overseas executives determined to defend their patch with rational, logical arguments about productivity, logistics and profitability. After years of painful discussion, it was agreed to close the factory in Northern Ireland.  Even now, says Masamichi Terabatake, the current President of Japan Tobacco, a Japan based executive needs to be prepared to travel around the world regularly to discuss strategy with local executives. “You need to keep global staff motivated. Investment and marketing cannot be left vague, they have to be quantitative so they can be transparently discussed. That’s probably why executives in the West are a bit younger!” he says.

    NSG acquired UK’s Pilkington in 2006, becoming heavily indebted to do so. From being very domestic, it became a company whose sales were 80% overseas. Unfortunately this proved to be terrible timing as the automotive and architectural glass market crashed after the Lehman Shock.

    Many of the acquirers also struggled because they did not have managers with experience of managing overseas businesses.  As Nikkei Business magazine says, mega M&A means mega complexity for which plenty of preparation and a high level of management know-how, with the ability to spread this know-how horizontally and vertically is needed for success.  It’s still not clear how far Japanese companies have progressed in this.

    Rudlin Consulting has assisted many European companies acquired by a Japanese parent. Please contact Pernille Rudlin for further details.

  • The enduring Japanese family firm

    The enduring Japanese family firm

    I attended a Japan Society talk last month on shinise  (Japanese family firms) – given by academics Innan Sasaki and Davide Ravasi.  Sasaki and Ravasi argued that shinise have survived over 100 years, by keeping small and focused on traditional crafts like sweet making, sake brewing, and textiles.  They are very much embedded in the society and community in which they operate – the highest concentration is in Japan’s old capital, Kyoto.  In return for their commitment to the local community, they gain a social status and support from the community.  They are meant to have a higher moral purpose than pure profit and therefore do not seek to take risks and grow much beyond their current geography and sector – which means they are more resilient to external economic shocks.  When downturns happen locally, they survive through the strength of local support. This contrasts with what Sasaki and Ravasi call “instrumental” firms, who exist for a purely economic purpose.

    Even large Japanese multinationals behave like Kyoto shinise

    Listening to their descriptions of shinise‘s motivations and behaviours, I realised they were very similar to the way I describe bigger, multinational Japanese firms in my seminars.   Even though Japanese multinationals have taken the risk to expand overseas, and are often no longer owned by the founding family, the ethos of having a higher moral purpose than shareholder value, of corporate contribution to society and strong risk aversion to ensure longevity still endures.

    And like the shinise, the darker side is the sacrifices needed to be regarded as a proper member of the family firm and the difficulty of becoming a senior manager if you were not born into it – or at least recruited straight from university like Japanese headquarter permanent staff.

    Nikkei Business magazine had a feature last month on family firms in Japan showcasing research that family owned firms in Japan perform better than non-family owned firms in terms of Return on Assets. “They don’t hold on to unnecessary assets” says Professor Yasuhiro Ochiai of Shizuoka University.

    Japanese family owned multinationals that have performed well

    DMG Mori is still owned by the Mori family and has been particularly active recently in M&A overseas since the current Mori took over as President in 1999, most notably in their merger with German machine tool manufacturer DMG.  Apparently quite a few of DMG Mori’s employees come from the wider “family” of customers and suppliers.

    Of course the most famous Japanese company still managed by a founding family member is Toyota.  However the current President Akio Toyoda is adamant that the company name is Toyota, the family name is Toyoda, and Toyota is not a Toyoda family company, “it’s everyone’s company.”

    Those that are listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and also active in Europe were:

    • Suntory (Torii family – founded by Shinjiro Torii in 1899) – chairman is from the founding family.
    • Aisin (automotive parts maker in the Toyota group founded in 1949 – chairman is part of the Toyoda founding family)
    • Shimano (Founded 1921, president is a Shimano)
    • DIC (Dainippon Ink) founded in 1908 by Kijiro Kawamura, a Kawamura is on the board of directors

    And how to avoid toxic family rows

    It’s not all joy in a family of course. Nikkei Business also looks at the family rows that have affected the performance of companies like Idemitsu (petroleum company) founding family shareholders fighting a merger with Showa Shell and the rebellion against founding family member Yoichiro Ushioda and chairman by executives of LIXIL (owners of German bathroom fittings company Grohe).

    Nikkei Business’s prescription for avoiding trouble is:

    1. Frequent communication between family members
    2. Treat family members who are employees the same way as other employees in terms of company regulations
    3. Don’t withhold information for family only, be transparent in management
    4. Don’t appoint a successor from the family if there is noone suitable
    5. Keep family assets and company assets separate
    6. When there is a generation changeover, keep criticisms to yourself
    7. Avoid too many family members as employees
    8. Ensure a structure is in place to stop family members going rogue

    For more on what being a “family” means for Japanese firms and the non-Japanese employees that work for them, this was one of my most popular articles in recent years.

  • 4 cultures of controlling overseas subsidiaries

    4 cultures of controlling overseas subsidiaries

    [playht_player width=”100%” height=”175″ voice=”Lily”]During a recent trip to Japan I visited Amazon’s offices to have lunch with an acquaintance who has been working there for 1 year and 3 months.  He told me that Amazon has expanded so rapidly this past year that he is now in the upper half of a chart which shows all employees ranked by their length of time working for the company.

    He also told me that almost all the non-Japanese people working there were, like him, locally hired and that there were hardly any expatriate staff from the US headquarters. I therefore wondered how Amazon HQ could control a subsidiary which is growing so rapidly without any expatriate managers to keep monitor it.

    Amazon also tries to minimize the number of processes and procedures it has, in order to maintain the speedy, fast to market, start up mentality it had when it first began over twenty years’ ago.

    The 3 usual ways to control overseas operations

    In the various multinationals and their subsidiaries I have worked in or with, you can usually find three types of headquarter control.  American, sales focused companies tend to control their subsidiaries by setting numerical targets. If the subsidiary employees and managers hit the targets, they get bonuses, if they miss them, they get fired.  Many multinationals who are not American in origin use these systems because numbers are easy for everyone to understand, regardless of language.

    Another way of managing subsidiaries which both European and American multinationals also use is to ensure compliance through having strong regulations, processes and systems, and clear hierarchical chains of command, so everyone knows who has responsibility and authority for each part of the business.

    A third way, which is more common among Japanese companies and also companies such as the German Mittelstand, family owned companies, is “control by the family” – in other words members of the headquarters family are sent out to subsidiaries to monitor what is going on and promote the corporate culture.

    Amazon’s way

    My Amazon contact explained that Amazon ensures its employees behave in compliance with Amazon’s core values by having a very rigorous hiring process.  Candidates are interviewed several times by multiple employees and asked questions about past experiences, to reveal what kind of mindset they have.

    I can imagine, however, that it is difficult for Japanese companies to use this method if their overseas subsidiaries were the result of an acquisition, or if the company has already been operating overseas for several decades.  There will already be a substantial legacy of staff who may have rather different values and behaviours to those of the Japanese headquarters.

    It would also be a mistake, and damaging to the benefits of having diverse, localised operations that are close to their customers, to impose too rigid a set of behaviours and values on all overseas employees.

    Nonetheless, I strongly recommend that Japanese companies who are about to acquire or set up operations overseas ensure they have a clear, globally understandable company mission and values (rinen) and hire or promote their overseas employees accordingly.

    This article appears in Pernille Rudlin’s latest book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

  • No Japanese visitors please, we’re busy, say Estonian start ups

    No Japanese visitors please, we’re busy, say Estonian start ups

    Estonian e-residency was something I considered for my business as a possible Brexit contingency plan.  It wouldn’t have helped me keep my EU citizenship, but I could at least run the European side of the business from Estonia, and have a euro bank account for invoicing in euros. In the end I decided to ask my German partner to take over the euro business, but I was very tempted, having had an enjoyable business trip there a couple of years’ ago, combined with a holiday.

    I wrote a couple of articles about Estonia and e-residency for a Japanese magazine after that, and it would seem the word has got out to Japanese businesses about Estonia’s digital economy as according to Kota Alex Saito, co- founder of SetGo, an e-residency business in Estonia, he is constantly having to field enquiries from Japanese businesses wanting to visit start ups there.

    The dreaded hyoukei houmon

    The Estonia Briefing Centre says that 146 groups of 1135 Japanese people visited Estonia in 2018, the second biggest grouping after Germany.  However, as Saito points out, very few of them actually then start businesses or invest in Estonia or bring Estonian business to Japan.  It is more what the Japanese call 表敬訪問 (hyoukei houmon – usually translated as “courtesy call”).

    For Estonian start ups, it is more of a discourtesy to give up your time to show round groups of visitors, and get nothing in return except maybe some rice crackers.  As Saito says, they are expecting visits to lead to some sort of business proposition, so “let’s keep in touch” is really not a good enough result.  Hyoukei houmon were the bane of my life when I worked for Mitsubishi Corporation in London too – trying to persuade busy European executives that meeting Japanese “missions” would not be a waste of their time.

    A difference in scale and mindset

    For the Japanese visitors, the main point seems to be simply to see the petrie dish of a digital economy.  But as Saito says, Estonia only has a population of 1.3 million, so trying to scale that up by 100 times to a Japanese scale is not a simple process.  Furthermore, Estonia has a highly transparent system of data on companies, government and people, so e-government is less feared.  There is a big difference in mindset that Japan could learn from, but may find hard to imitate.

    Saito gives advice which I often give in my seminars to Japanese and Europeans working together  – make the purpose of your meeting clear, do your research beforehand, make sure there are action points at the end that you follow up on.

  • A no deal Brexit will put the boot in for Japanese companies in the UK

    A no deal Brexit will put the boot in for Japanese companies in the UK

    My first job at Mitsubishi Corporation was exporting British made shoes from companies like Trickers and Crockett & Jones to Japan. They are high end shoes anyway, and Japanese tariffs of 30% on shoe imports certainly pushed them even further upmarket.  So when I was in Japan last month I was happy to see that one of our customers still had its Trading Post flagship shop in Aoyama, despite the so-called two lost decades in terms of economic growth. They must be one of the few businesses enjoying the fact that Brexit delays have improved their profit margins. Thanks to the new EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, tariffs on European shoe exports to Japan were reduced to 21% from February of this year. They will eventually be eliminated over the next 10 years.

    Trickers and Crockett & Jones are presumably shipping out shoes to Japan as fast as they can make them while the UK’s membership of the EU lasts. Although Japan has entered discussions with the UK on a trade deal, they have made it clear that they are not going to concede as much as they did to the EU, and leather goods is one of the categories they are going to use as a bargaining weapon.

    No roll over is bad for British shoes, cheese and booze

    So a no deal Brexit or a Brexit before a UK-Japan free trade agreement is struck is bad news for the UK shoe industry, (and British cheese makers and whisky distillers will also miss out on the EPA’s tariff reductions). But not rolling over the EU-Japan EPA in to a UK-Japan trade agreement as soon as the UK leaves the EU will only have a small direct impact on both economies. According to a JETRO survey of over 3,000 Japanese companies, from March of this year, only 8.6% import from the UK, compared to 24.1% importing from Western Europe (excluding the UK) 66.2% from China and 24.2% from the USA.

    Conversely, 22% of Japanese companies export to the UK, compared to 35% exporting to non-UK Western Europe, 49.6% to the USA and 59% to China.  It’s obvious from these figures why the US-China trade war is more concerning to Japan than Brexit.

    You could argue that a UK-Japan free trade agreement would improve those percentages, but that’s an awful lot of shoes, cheese and booze to make any impact. Furthermore, a lot of the imports and exports between the UK and Japan may be EU related, rather than purely bilateral.  Think car parts from Japan to build cars for European consumers, or UK generated professional services for a Japanese EU headquarters and its European subsidiaries.

    But no deal with the EU is even more of a headache for Japanese companies in the UK

    Japanese companies that have a presence in the UK (just under 10% of the companies surveyed) have made it very clear that a No (UK-EU) Deal Brexit would be a disaster for them – far more than the UK no longer being part of the EU-Japan EPA. As frequently pointed out, they invested in the UK as a gateway to the rest of Europe.

    45% of the turnover of Japanese companies in the UK is sales to Europe according to figures from the annual reports of the 200 or so who give regional breakdowns of sales.  The range is anywhere from close to 0% for companies selling everything from lighting to metal pressing to seeds just to the UK, through to 100% – largely automotive parts manufacturers who export almost all of their production to Europe, or at least sell it via their European headquarters in continental Europe.

    Many of those who are focused on domestic UK sales are importing from Japan, China and Asia, or are at the end of a complex supply chain stretching across Europe. Some are not involved in trade of goods at all – for example NTT Data and Building Design Partnership.  The latter is one of the many of the services sector companies that have recently become Japan-owned via acquisition. NTT is aiming to grow its UK government business after Brexit, but if the UK economy tanks thanks to a no deal, it may have to wait a while. A JETRO survey last year highlighted that a UK economic slump because of Brexit was at the top of the list of concerns for Japanese companies in the UK and the rest of the EU, even more than changes in regulation or currency fluctuations.

    The UK looks to lose its crown as the top European destination for Japanese acquisitions

    Japanese acquisitions of British companies continued after the referendum, but the 2019 JETRO survey shows that it is likely the UK will lose its crown as the top destination in the EU for Japanese foreign direct investment. Non-UK Western Europe is in the top five destinations for expanding business for manufacturing textiles, clothing, foods, petrochemicals/plastics, electrical machinery, electronic components, fine engineering and also specialist services.  The UK does not feature at all in the top five of any of these sectors.

    The UK’s service sector functions as a gateway to Europe is still the biggest influence on Japanese investment – the UK is a top 20 destination for expanding services such as regional coordination(#9), logistics (#13), R&D (#14), sales (#15) and localisation (#17), as well as high value added manufacturing (#17). However, non-UK Western Europe ranks higher and is in the top 10 destinations for all of these categories.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Brexit yanks the lid off some stinky realities for Japanese business in the UK

    Brexit yanks the lid off some stinky realities for Japanese business in the UK

    My least favourite Japanese expression is “kusai mono ni futa” – when it stinks, put a lid on it. It is at the root of many Japanese corporate governance scandals. Mistakes are made or problems surface and instead of exposing them and causing loss of face all round, they are swept under the carpet, in the hope that they will somehow magically disappear. But of course stinky things with lids on just get stinkier.

    On the face of it, there was nothing stinky about Japanese companies in the UK.  The very fact that the UK was such an easy place to do business – on a European and global scale – lulled Japanese companies into complacency.  Japanese expatriates like living in the UK, particularly around London, where the vast majority of Japanese business people are based.  A couple of years’ traineeship in London is also a great incentive to lure scarce young English speaking Japanese into your graduate recruitment scheme.

    Brexit exposed complacency about profitability in the UK

    Over 125 Japanese companies in the UK are the European headquarters, employing over 25,000 people (of the 160,000 UK employees in total who work for 1000 Japanese companies), with a combined turnover of over £40bn.  Much of that turnover derived from management fees from Japan headquarters, dividends from European subsidiaries or royalties from intellectual property, so the profitability or otherwise of the UK business itself was not so exposed.

    Profitability in manufacturing is far more obvious.  Nissan, Honda and Toyota’s factories in the UK had high levels of productivity – they had to be to win the right to make each new model. But Honda never managed to sell enough of its cars in Europe for Swindon to reach full capacity.  The car industry is going through a shift away from petrol and diesel to electric. Japanese manufacturers like to be near their key markets to develop new models, and for electric vehicles, China is a far bigger and more promising market than Europe. The supply chains for electric vehicles are more developed and close knit in their Japan base.

    Brexit yanked the lid off some stinky realities.  As the JETRO annual survey on business conditions for Japanese companies in Europe details, 60% of UK based Japanese companies predicted the future impact of Brexit on their business would be negative, and 25% said it had had a negative impact already. Most cited the threat to the supply chain of customs duties and customs procedures or divergence in regulations being introduced as their top concerns.

    Over 90% of Japanese companies could withdraw their European headquarters from the UK because of Brexit

    61% said that they had already decided to relocate/withdraw or had already relocated or withdrawn certain functions from their regional headquarters in the UK and another 32% are considering it – mostly as a partial relocation to another EU member state. As is well known, Panasonic and Sony have already done this. It was not just the threat of Brexit disrupting invoicing and customs clearance, but also in response as much to the new Japanese tax haven law. The UK’s lowering of the corporation tax rate of 17% to show Global Britain was still open for business meant revenue from dividends and royalties received in the UK would be considered as tax avoidance by the Japanese tax authorities.

    More than two thirds of Japanese companies could withdraw their European sales functions from the UK

    29% of Japanese companies in the UK have decided to relocate/withdraw or have already relocated/withdrawn their sales functions and a further 38% are considering doing so. Sharp Electronics has moved their inventory to Sharp in France along with responsibility for logistics and warehousing. Various automotive sector companies have moved customer accounts and product lines to Germany.

    Moving sales or regional headquarter functions out of the UK does not have an immediate impact on jobs in the UK. In fact labour shortage is cited as the top concern for Japanese companies across Europe.  So they are likely to try to hang on to the employees they have, and the regional management will just operate in a much more virtual way – Sharp says its UK base will still have an executive/board level responsibility for Europe, as that is where its European executives are currently based.  For now.

    Nearly two-thirds of Japanese manufacturers are withdrawing or considering withdrawing manufacturing from the UK

    33% of Japanese manufacturers have decided to relocate or withdraw or have relocated or withdrawn their manufacturing from the UK  and 30% are considering doing so. This may seem surprisingly low given the fuss made over the car companies and their supply chains being impacted by Brexit.  But actually most Japanese manufacturers have alternative plants in Europe they can use if necessary. Those who do not are usually manufacturing highly specialised products that are less supply chain time critical, or for UK sales only or that they are presumably confident they can sell across Europe no matter what barriers there are.

    No deal preparations

    The JETRO survey did not specify the type of Brexit when asking Japanese companies in Europe in general about relocation or withdrawal plans, but did ask if any countermeasures had been taken for a no deal Brexit. Just over 10% of all Japanese companies – in the UK and Europe – had already made plans or were currently making plans. A further 15% of Japanese companies in the UK were intending to plan for no deal but only 4% of non UK EU companies were intending to plan (this was as of October 2018).  The most popular countermeasure was stockpiling (21%), followed by reorganising functions within the company group (10%).

    Financial services already prepared for all possibilities

    All the Japanese financial services companies that would be affected by Brexit have already put their plans into action – most now have licenses for the UK and obtained financial passporting or licenses in the EU as necessary.  Again, having to take a hard, cold look at their European operations has taken the lid off some long standing whiffy problems, particularly for Nomura, which looks like it will be shutting down its global wholesale side in London entirely.

    No rollover and then there were none

    Stockpiling as the main countermeasure for a no deal Brexit assumes that eventually a deal will be reached, before the stocks run out.  But such deals take time.  The EU-Japan European Partnership Agreement (EPA) started in 2013, finalised at the end of 2017, signed off in July 2018, and was in force from February 2019.  Known as cars for cheese – it was actually meant to promote food and car exports both ways. Japan has already been promoting European wines and cheeses in its supermarkets and announced the first shipment of fully farmed tuna to Europe under the EPA agreement.

    Similarly, reduction on tariffs on cars and car parts was meant to protect Japanese branded manufacturing in Europe (because they could easily import Japan manufactured parts) and help European car  manufacturers export more cars to Japan.

    Hard stinky cheese

    If a no deal Brexit happens, although Japan started talks with the UK about rolling over the EPA, it has stated this would not be a cut and paste job.  Japan is clear that it expects more concessions from the UK than in the EU deal – including cheese and cars. So British cheese makers may find their exports to Japan have a longer time to ripen than they were planning, in the event of a no deal.

     

  • Fewer Japanese in the UK, but more are making it their permanent home – thanks to Brexit?

    Fewer Japanese in the UK, but more are making it their permanent home – thanks to Brexit?

    The UK is still overwhelmingly the most popular place for Japanese residents in the EU to live, according to Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There are nearly 63,000 Japanese nationals living in the UK, compared to 46,000 in the next most popular country, Germany.  The Japanese community in the UK has shrunk by 6% since 2014, however, whereas Germany’s Japanese community has grown by 22% over the same period.

    In fact all other major EU countries have more Japanese people living in them than four years’ ago.  It is only the UK that has shown a net fall in numbers. The Netherlands has had the biggest proportionate rise in Japanese residents since 2014 – 41% from 6,532 to 9,223.

    On the face of it this would seem to be a Brexit related shift.  The Netherlands and Germany have been the most popular alternative bases for shifting headquarters and sales staff to, away from the UK, as we noted in a previous post.

    UK loss of global prestige as a destination for media and diplomats

    But looking more closely at the different categories used by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for classifying Japanese nationals reveals some other non-business factors too. The biggest proportional decrease is in Japanese people in the government related category – a 44% fall from 1,286 to 722. In a further indication of the UK’s drop in global prestige perhaps, the number of media related Japanese nationals has dropped 26% from 371 to 273. The largest drop in numbers is in the academic/student category – down nearly 7,000 from 20,000 in 2014 – peaking at 21,000 in 2015 and declining since.

    Japanese students also put off by hostile environment

    The fall in student/academic numbers is worrying, as this is a good source of income for UK universities.  When we looked at this a year ago, we noted that Japanese students are still studying in Europe – just more in Germany or France.  Or, like one participant in my seminar yesterday, they’ve realised they can learn English by studying in Asian universities – which are cheaper and nearer to Japan.

    Talking to Japanese specialist recruiters, it may also be that the UK’s “hostile environment” has made it more difficult for Japanese students to stay on in the UK after graduating, to find a job. The 27% increase in permanent residents who have Japanese nationality over the past 4 years suggests that Brexit and visa worries may have caused a large number (nearly 22,000 now) of Japanese resident in the UK to take the leap of acknowledging that they are going to stay in the UK permanently and need to make sure their status is secure.

  • Chipping away at the three treasures of Japanese HR

    Chipping away at the three treasures of Japanese HR

    Several Japanese blue chip companies have announced some quite radical changes to their HR systems, just in time for the new Reiwa era. The so called three treasures of lifetime employment, seniority based pay and a company union have been looking a little tarnished for some years now. They seem a legacy not even of the Heisei era but of the post war Showa era of a booming economy and a need to retain a young workforce.

    Hitachi had shown the way four years ago (as described in our blog post at the time), abolishing seniority based pay for its managers and replacing it with pay based on job roles. They have made further waves recently with the announcement of the first ever Hitachi subsidiary President to be in their forties.  The newly formed Hitachi Global Life Solutions will be led by Jun Taniguchi, born in 1972.

    Hitachi claim that this new system is needed for the company to be truly global and able to appoint and transfer managers around the world, regardless of where they were recruited. Beer and soft drink manufacturer Asahi Group Holdings has also been shifting to global standards. Around half their employees are non-Japanese, as a result of their acquisitions of European brands such as Peroni, Grolsch and Fullers. They have said their Presidents and CEOs will be evaluated on return on equity from now on, and given the boot if it is not maintained above 13%.

    Japanese megabank MUFG says it will reduce new hires in Japan by 45% to 530 next spring, and will cut the 6000 employees in its Tokyo headquarters by half. Not all Japanese HR traditions are being thrown out of the window, however, as the surplus 3000 will not be made redundant, but rather redeployed to sales functions or sent overseas to areas where MUFG is expanding like the USA and Asia (but not it seems, Europe).  MUFG  is automating the functions that these staff performed, as well as cutting many of its retail branches in Japan. It will instead be beefing up its overseas compliance and digital payment systems divisions.

    Some Japanese politicians and commentators have said that the “rei” of Reiwa sounds rather cold, as it can sometimes mean “order” or “command”.  It also, when combined with the radical for water, becomes a character meaning chilly or freezing.  It certainly feels like some icy winds will be blasting through Japanese cosy HR traditions in the new era.

  • Are Japanese companies leaving the UK because of Brexit?

    Are Japanese companies leaving the UK because of Brexit?

    I’m afraid the answer to this question is yes, and no.  Bits of Japanese companies are leaving. What will be left in  the long run is some kind of UK-based training ground for Japanese companies’ star recruits to learn global management, with a local sales workforce attached.

    I’ve come back from a recent trip to Japan clutching the brand new Toyo Keizai directory of Japanese companies overseas, which provides the data to dig into this question more deeply. It provides some clues as to whether, for example, Honda ending production in Europe is in part due to the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement reducing tariffs to zero on cars and car parts imported from Japan. If that was the case, there might be a general shift of automotive production away from the EU.

    Asia is far more important to Japan than Europe

    The number of Japanese companies overseas has increased 58% from 2008 to 2018, according to the Toyo Keizai data, to 31,574.  The true number will be bigger, as I know from my researches into the UK, there are many Japanese companies that Toyo Keizai has not managed to track down, or who maybe just don’t respond to their surveys. 62% of Japanese companies overseas are in Asia (excluding Japan obviously), 15% in Europe, 14% in North America, 5% in Latin America, 2% in Oceania, 1% in Africa and 1% in the Middle East.

    If you look at it by employee number, the proportion is roughly the same – 68% in Asia, 11% in Europe, 11.8% in North America, 6.6% in Latin America, 1.5% in Oceania, 0.7% in Africa, 0.4% in the Middle East. An obvious factor in why there are proportionately more employees to number of companies in Asia and Latin America is the greater number of manufacturing operations in those regions.

    So already we see Europe represents 11-15% of the business of Japanese multinationals, and those companies are relatively less likely to be manufacturing operations than in Asia or Latin America.

    The number of Japanese companies in Europe has increased 35% in ten years

    Japanese companies have not been pulling out of Europe, however. There was a 35% increase in the number of companies in Europe 2008-2018, so not far off the average global increase of 37%.  The biggest growth was in Latin America – 47%, then the Middle East (45%) and Africa (43%) – but from a small base.  The number of companies in Asia grew 38% and only 30% in North America.

    Growth in the number of Japanese companies overseas has been more muted in the past 4 years – a 7.9% increase 2015-2018.  But the  increase in the number of Japanese companies in Europe was above average – at 12.5%.  The increases in companies in Asia (7.6%) and Latin America (5.6%) were below average – so there was a boom in Japanese investment in developing countries during the 2008-2014 period, but this died down in the past 4 years.

    Japanese automotive manufacturers are not pulling out of Europe – quite the reverse

    So how about investment in automotive manufacturing – the sector that has made the most noise in Brexit UK?  The number of Japanese companies overseas in the “transportation machinery manufacturing” category that Toyo Keizai uses (which presumably corresponds to automotive manufacturing) rose 6% 2015-2018, so significantly slower growth than overall.  Again, Europe showed above average growth of 13%, but only represents 10% of transportation machinery manufacturers overseas operations.   Over 64% of automotive manufacturer sites are in ex-Japan Asia. So although Japanese automotive companies are not pulling out of Europe – rather the reverse – the major part of Japanese automotive investment is and continues to be in Asia.  So no surprises really that Honda and others are choosing to focus on Asia for electric vehicle development – that is where the largest ecosystems and supply chains are based.

    UK is still has the most automotive manufacturers in Europe, but is not getting any new investment

    How about the UK in all of this?  The UK had and continues to have the largest number of automotive related manufacturers in Europe, according to Toyo Keizai – 32 in 2015 (out of 192 in Europe) and 30 in 2018 (out of 217). I haven’t been able to identify both of the companies that have withdrawn from the UK, but one is almost certainly Keihin, 41% owned by Honda, who shut down production of vehicle engine management systems and climate control systems in the UK in 2014-5 and shifted production to the Czech Republic.  The other might be more to do with renaming and consolidation rather than withdrawal of manufacturing.

    Keihin’s move is clearly “pre-Brexit” but what is obvious is that the UK is not getting any new investment in the automotive sector since Brexit. Of the 29 new automotive manufacturing operations started in Europe in 2015-2018, 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.  Germany, France and the Czech Republic are now not far behind the UK in the number of automotive production sites that they host.

    So the idea that the zero tariffs on cars and car part imports from Japan which would eventually arise from the EU-Japan Economic Partnership has meant that it is no longer attractive to manufacture cars and car parts in the UK or the rest of the EU also does not seem to hold – yet.  In fact I was surprised to see that Western Europe has held up well against the cheaper Eastern European countries.

    UK employees of Japanese companies up 20% on 2015, mainly due to acquisitions

    Generally, the number of Japanese companies in the UK is still rising – 972 in 2018 according to Toyo Keizai, 11.1% up on 2015. The other countries in the top 5 – Germany, Netherlands, France and Italy are all hosting more Japanese companies too, and the numbers have grown slightly faster than in the UK, by between 11.8% to 13.5% over the past 4 years.

    Many of the new Japanese in companies in the UK over the past few years have been acquisitions in biotech/pharma, high tech, outsourcing/staffing, automotive services and new arrivals have been in fintech, or investment/holding companies.

    So what about the companies that have said they are leaving the UK because of Brexit, such as Panasonic and Sony?  Well, rather like Keihin, they are not actually leaving the UK, just moving some functions, in this case the regional headquarters functions rather than manufacturing, to the Netherlands or Germany.  This kind of “leaving” – turning what were incorporated subsidiaries into branches, has emerged in other Japanese companies too, as one reaction to Brexit.  Invoicing, tax on sales, royalties etc will all be taken care of by the regional headquarters, and the UK branch will be funded by management fees.

    So although the numbers employed by Japanese companies in the UK continue to rise (by 20% since 2015), this is more the result of acquisition of existing staff, rather than the creation of large numbers of new jobs that greenfield manufacturing investment brings.

    During my trip to Japan last week I met with Leo Lewis, Financial Times Tokyo Correspondent, and it is to him that I owe the insight that Japanese companies will never leave the UK completely, as it is too attractive an incentive to their highflyers, to be able to promise a couple of years early in their career to learn the ropes of global business in the UK. But bits will nonetheless leave, as the recent news about Nomura’s restructuring shows.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • The fourth industrial revolution should not be mercantilized

    The fourth industrial revolution should not be mercantilized

    UK is the birthplace of innovation and will not sink, despite Brexit, says Toru Sugawara, the deputy editor of the Nikkei Business magazine – Japan’s equivalent of The Economist (only with more business, less economy).

    He acknowledges that Brexit is casting a shadow on the world economy, and that the problems will not end just with an extension, as the negotiations will drag on, unless the result of the referendum is reversed.

    He points to how employment remains buoyant in the UK, despite GDP growth being the lowest in 6 years, and says that this could be because immigration from the EU is decreasing – which was one of the reasons people voted to leave. He does not mention that net immigration has not dropped, as more people are coming from non-EU countries.  So unless you believe that EU immigrants only have jobs which UK natives could do, and non-EU immigrants only do jobs that UK natives couldn’t do…

    He believes the UK’s resilience derives from an inner strength which helped it to lead the industrial revolution as the “birthplace of innovation.” Because the UK has worldclass universities  “UK research levels are extremely high. Even if they leave the EU, there are researchers who want to learn from the UK” – according to  an engineer from a major Japanese electronics company.

    The UK is similar to Japan, Sugawara notes, in that neither was able to match Silicon Valley in terms of being able to turn innovations into world changing businesses.  He thinks the UK is changing, however, dating from when the British Business Bank launched in 2014, bringing together various funds for startups and small businesses and also the introduction of the regulatory sandbox, to allow new kinds of financial services to test their products.

    Venture capital funding in the UK in 2018 was $7.9bn, double that of Germany or France (although what he doesn’t say is that this was down from a high of $8.1bn the previous year, and that Germany and France seem to be catching up) . Dr Yuri Okina of the Japan Research Institute points out that the UK’s strength is that as well as having the world’s financial centre, there is a rich source of accountants, lawyers, consultants and other specialists who support an ecosystem for new business.

    If this network could be boosted further, then the UK could lead the 4th wave of the industrial revolution, asserts Sugawara. He warns that Japan, who puts its funds into propping up zombie companies, with regulatory systems that impede new industries from growing, will get left behind. “That’s the bigger worry” he concludes.

    So he seems to be turning an encouraging pat on the back for the UK into a kick up the backside for Japan.  What he says is not going to be news to many Japanese companies, who have reacted to the difficulties they face in Japan by investing in the UK (and elsewhere in Europe). Sugawara mentions SoftBank‘s acquisition of the UK’s ARM, but there have been plenty of other less spectacular investments. Much of it has to do with CASE (Connected, Autonomous, Shared, Electric) in the automotive industry –  Sony Innovation has invested in What3Words (a geocoding system) – also invested in by Daimler. Itochu has invested in Hiyacar and I realise now that its acquisition of UK car repair chain KwikFit probably also fits into this automotive services play. Similarly Sumitomo Corporation has invested in the Nordic parking company Q-Park and Sweden’s car sharing service Aimo.  Japan’s Park24 acquiring National Car Parks in the UK is probably also looking to a CASE future. Panasonic acquired Spanish automotive systems and parts company Ficosa in 2017.

    So really, it’s not about any one country leading the fourth industrial revolution – it will be collaborative and global by its very nature. Both Japan and the UK need to keep their doors as wide open as possible to let everyone get on the ride.