Japanese business in Europe

Just-in-time solution to Brexit for Japanese automotive suppliers

The report on Sky News about the Dutch government advising Dutch companies not to use British made parts in goods for export before Brexit spurred me to do some more analysis into the impact this kind of advice might have on Japanese automotive suppliers based in the UK. In fact I even stayed up until 1am last night doing it – I’m that obsessed.

The results of tweaking my database of Japanese companies in Europe reveal that there are around 40 Japanese automotive suppliers in the UK who have production facilities in the UK. They range from solder suppliers to paint production to car seat manufacturers, from 7 to over 1000 employees, employing around 13,600 in total.

Are 13,600 jobs in UK-based Japanese automotive suppliers at risk?

So should those 13,600 people be worried about their jobs right now? 75% of those Japanese companies have similar production sites elsewhere in the European Union. So supply to EU car plants could easily shift to those sites.

The 40 automotive suppliers with production sites in the UK can of course continue to supply the UK based car manufacturers, if there is enough demand to sustain viable production levels. There is a theory (blog post here) in the Japanese automotive world that viable production levels require a market of 100 million people, which is greater than the UK population. Of course UK based car plants are not just supplying the UK, but the EU and in the case of Honda, their Civic model is also exported to the USA and even to Japan. In fact almost 80% of British car production is exported, the majority of this to the EU.

What were the secret UK government promises to Japanese car manufacturers in the UK?

So the 13,600 jobs are less at risk, if the UK based car manufacturers can sustain their exports to the EU after Brexit. Which is why there is the concern that a lack of a deal with the EU means 10% tariffs on British car exports to the European Union. Presumably the secret promises that the UK government has made to Japanese car manufacturers include some kind of bung to ensure that any cost of the tariffs is compensated for. Whether this is allowed under WTO rules or acceptable to the EU, I leave to the trade wonks. I suspect the answer is no. It also explains why the UK government is so keen on the customs partnership solution and max fac. Presumably they see this as enabling them in real time to have a grip on what is being traded and tariffs imposed, so they can compensate UK car manufacturers accordingly or set up a fast lane for them in processing at the borders.

The quandary facing Japanese automotive suppliers with no UK production base

The UK government presumably also pitched max fac to the car manufacturers as the technical solution to the worries flagged up in the report in the Financial Times yesterday, of delays at the borders disrupting just-in-time supply chains for automotive parts coming in from the EU. This is why Japanese car manufacturers like Nissan have been pressurising automotive suppliers to set up in the UK, preferably in the new industrial park right by Nissan’s factory in Sunderland.

Weeding through my database, I have identified 33 Japanese automotive suppliers with sales arms in the UK but who do not have production in the UK. So should they now consider setting up production bases in the UK? They have to take a view on how likely it is that UK based car production will be maintained after Brexit. How will the Nissan-Renault alliance resolve itself – will Renault become dominant, in which case, expect French production to be prioritised? Nissan also has another EU based plant, in Spain. Honda wants its UK plant to be a global hub, but also has a factory in Turkey (which exports car models such as the CIvic to the EU under the EU-Turkey customs union). Toyota has car plants in France and Russia.

Consolidate supply chain within EU, leave importing to UK to the last possible minute

A further complication is that the import and export of automotive components is not just a one off – the same part may go back and forth several times between multiple factories, having solder/paint/other components added. Concerns about rules of origin and the paperwork involved, and possible delays at the border, along with the car manufacturers themselves essentially saying to suppliers “that’s your problem not ours” might lead a supplier to conclude that the best solution is to consolidate the supply chain within EU borders, until the final moment when the component has to be brought to the car manufacturers’ UK site for assembly. There might be some more warehouses at the Sunderland industrial park, and maybe some finishing/assembly facilities, but a safer, cheaper bet would be to put most production in Eastern European countries such as Slovenia or Slovakia, which does indeed seem to be what has happened over the past year or two.

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UK is the only top 10 European economy where the number of Japanese residents has fallen – why?

The UK is the only top 10 European economy where the number of Japanese residents has declined from 2015 to 2016.

The number of Japanese residents in the UK hit an all time high in 2015 of just under 68,000, according to Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This fell by 4.5% in 2016. The last time there was a significant fall in Japanese residents in the UK was 2007-9. Presumably this can be attributed to the Lehman Shock, and numbers have been climbing steadily since 2010. So why has there been another drop? Brexit might be the easy answer, but the referendum vote was in June 2016, so it seems a rather immediate impact.

There are more Japanese in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, both in absolute and relative terms. The second highest population of Japanese in Europe is in Germany (44,027) and the third highest is France (41,641), with other countries having substantially less Japanese presence (4th is Italy, with 13,808).

I was surprised there were that many Japanese people in France as there are fewer large Japanese companies and regional headquarters in France relative to Germany or the UK. Fortunately, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs breaks down the total by whether they are permanent residents or long term residents – broken down by intra company transfers, self-employed and students/academic related. France has a relatively larger proportion of students, self employed and government related people, whereas the UK has relatively more permanent residents and Germany relatively more intra company transferees.

Number of permanent Japanese residents in the UK has risen, but academic, corporate and diplomatic residents have fallen

The number of permanent Japanese residents in the UK has risen by 4.5% to 19,785 (30% of all Japanese in the UK) and the number of long term residents has dropped 7.9% to 45,813.

The UK still has the highest number of intra company transfers in Europe – 17,841 – but this is 4% down on 2015. The bigger falls were in students/academics/researchers – 13.8% (from 19,100 to 16,461) and government related – a 25.7% decrease from 934 people to 743. So is this due to young Japanese becoming more reluctant to study overseas? Is the UK losing its centrality as a diplomatic posting?

Comparing the UK to trends in Germany and France shows that Japanese are still studying in Europe, just increasingly more in Germany or France (also large Japanese student populations in Italy, Spain and Switzerland and significant increases in the Netherlands and Ireland). Diplomats and other government officials are also gravitating more towards Germany and France (there are also a large number of Japanese government people in Switzerland).

Germany hosts almost double the number of Japanese companies than the UK does (1811 compared to 998) so the other key difference between Germany and the UK is the density of Japanese people on intra company transfers per Japanese company. The UK has by far the highest density – of around 18 Japanese residents per company, then Belgium with 12, then France with 11, Germany, Netherlands and UAE with 9. This is due to the large number of regional headquartered financial services and trading companies in London.

So what has changed since 2015 that has not impacted the other European countries so much, apart from Brexit? I conclude it must be the increasing difficulty of obtaining Tier 2 intra company transfer visas (as I mentioned in my comments to the Financial Times recently) and also student visas (as explained in this 2016 report). Government agency/diplomatic visas are dealt with separately I assume – maybe this is an element which can be explained by the UK’s declining international influence and more a question of reduced demand rather than reduced supply? Either way, Brexit and visa restrictions will be a combination precipitating further rebalancing away from the UK and to the continent, I predict.

Gender pay gap in UK’s largest Japanese employers is lower than average

Any company in the UK that employs over 250 people is supposed to have submitted their gender pay gap estimates by 4th April 2018. We ran our Top 30 Japanese companies through the Companies’ House database and found that all have submitted data for those subsidiaries which qualify.

The average pay gap of their 50 subsidiaries is around 15%, slightly lower than the national average of 18.4%. There are some interesting patterns in that there is a gender pay gap in women’s favour in the automotive and tyre businesses – Kwik-Fit and Stapletons (both owned by Itochu) and Micheldever (acquired by Sumitomo Rubber in 2017) and also Toyota Motor Manufacturing and NSG Pilkington Automotive. Looking at the detail, it seems this is to do with there being a lot of men in the lower paid jobs (presumably tyre fitting, shopfloor, delivery) and some well paid women in the higher paid, presumably managerial/executive jobs.

The gender pay gap is particularly bad in finance, although no worse for Japanese banks than for other UK based investment and retail banks.

The wooden spoon goes to Hitachi subsidiary Horizon Nuclear Power with a 41.9% pay gap, closely followed by Fujifilm, with a 41% pay gap.

Top 30 Japanese employers in the UK (April 2018) & gender pay gap
Rank	Company	UK employees 2016-7*	Gender gap
1	Fujitsu Services	9,326	17.9%
2	Nissan	7,755	-11.3%
3	Honda Motor Europe (sales)	6,539	27.1%
	Honda of the UK Manufacturing		4.5%
4	Itochu	6,515
	Kwik-Fit		-15.2%
	Stapleton’s (Tyre Services)		-24.9%
5	Hitachi Hitachi Consulting	3,998	30.3%
	Horizon Nuclear		41.9%
	Hitachi Capital		33.5%
	Hitachi Vantara		27.0%
	Hitachi Rail		-0.9%
6	Mitsubishi Corp Princes Foods	3,532	8.7%
7	Ricoh UK	3,484	17.4%
	Ricoh UK Products		10.4%
	Ricoh Europe		32.2%
8	Sony Europe	3,143	27.2%
	Sony Music		22.7%
	Sony DADC		8.7%
	Sony Interactive		12.8%
9	Toyota Motor Manufacturing	3,098	-6.4%
	Toyota (GB) (sales)		29.7%
9	Marubeni (Agrovista)	2,294	36%
10	Dentsu Aegis London	2,757	14.5%
	Dentsu Aegis Manchester		1.8%
11	Canon	2,693	15.8%
12	SoftBank (ARM)	2,173	15.5%
13	Nomura	2,166	36.9%
14	NSG Pilkington Automotive	2,128	-12.1%
	Pilkington Technology Management		31.7%
	Pilkington UK		8.3%
15	Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Goup	1,987	35.6%
16	Denso Manufacturing	1,897	24.2%
	Denso Marston		6.6%
17	NYK Group (Yusen Logistics)	1,855	4.0%
18	Mitsui Sumitomo & Aioi Nissay Dowa (Insure The Box)	1,809	19.0%
19	Calsonic Kansei UK	1,778	3.6%
	Calsonic Kansei Sunderland		3.6%
20	Konica Minolta	1,572	18.2%
21	Sumitomo Rubber (Micheldever Tyre Services)	1,543	-19.9%
22	Brother Industries (Domino UK)	1,384	15.1%
23	Olympus Keymed	1,348	27.7%
24	Fujifilm UK	1,257	41.0%
	Fujifilm Speciality Ink Systems		8.7%
	Fujifilm Diosynth		16.0%
25	Sumitomo Corporation (Howco Group)	1,249	17.5%
26	Unipres	1,237	3.1%
27	JT Group (Gallaher)	1,086	14.0%
28	Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation	1019	34.9%
29	Toyoda Gosei	1,192	0.9%
30	Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (Primetals)	1,152	38.1%
TOTAL		84,966	15.1%

Hybrid food cultures and the EU Japan Economic Partnership Agreement

The EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) has been characterised in Europe as “cars for cheese”. As a cheese loving North European, I did indeed miss being able to buy reasonably priced good quality cheese when I was living in Japan. It was a kind of comfort food for me – either hunks of cheese on bread, or sometimes I would have what I called my “spaghetti Bolognese” moment, where I would crave the umami of a tomato and beef sauce smothered with parmesan cheese.

But because I also lived in Japan as a child, traditional Japanese foods are comfort food for me too. Now I am living in the UK – I sometimes make miso soup (particularly the red miso I remember from when I was a child in Sendai), or okonomiyaki, or curry rice or tonkatsu to cheer myself up.

The EPA now has to be approved by various local European parliaments, and one of the ways of persuading them to accept the agreement is to point out that it will ensure the geographical designation of over 200 European food and drink products are protected in the Japanese market, such as Polish vodka or Parma ham.

If this argument is sufficiently persuasive to local parliaments, the agreement is expected to be ratified in 2018 and implemented in 2019.

Europeans get very passionate about the authenticity of local food – particularly the Italians. There is even a Twitter account called “Italians mad at food” (@Italiancomments) which retweets comments from Italians outraged – mostly at Americans – for putting mushrooms or garlic in carbonara sauce or pineapple on pizza.

Italians would not be impressed with my spaghetti Bolognese either – there is no such dish as spaghetti Bolognese in Italy. There is ragu alla Bolognese, which means simply a meat sauce – and is meant to be eaten with tagliatelle, not spaghetti.

The British have a long history of adopting foods from other cultures – our favourite national dish is Chicken Tikka Masala – which is a curry which does not exist in India – and the second or third generation British Chinese who run our takeaway food shops have become resigned to putting sweet and sour sauce on fries.

The British have become far more sophisticated about foreign food these days. Multicultural street food has become fashionable across Europe – most major cities have markets full of “yatai” – one in my town has a Chilean stall and a falafel (Middle Eastern food) stall which is actually run by a couple of Koreans.

Japanese people are somewhat dismayed to see fast food chains selling “sushi” in the UK which have little resemblance to the authentic Japanese version but of course curry rice, tempura and tonkatsu are actually hybrid Japanese/European/Indian foods themselves.

So the EPA seems likely to herald another chapter of hybridization. Japan and Europe will trade in each other’s authentic, local foods, and create new hybrids that will be the comfort foods for the next generation. It’s a business opportunity both for traditional farmers and adventurous cooks.

Situational leadership for Japanese managers in Europe

One of the issues that Japanese people who come to work in Europe find most challenging is the multiple nationalities of people they have to work with. Whether you are based in London, Duesseldorf or Amsterdam, it is highly likely that your colleagues will be a mixture of not just British, German or Dutch but also Romanian, Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish or indeed Indian or Chinese.

Much of the global leadership or management training that is offered in Japan is based on American models. Europeans are used to American management styles so they will tolerate them – at least superficially. However, many of these “one size fits all” models are not ultimately effective in getting Europeans to go beyond superficial compliance. In fact, they can have quite a demotivating effect, particularly if they are too rigidly focused on quantitative targets and objectives.

European managers themselves find that the American model which works the best is known as “situational leadership”. This is not a new theory – it was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the Americans Dr Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard. It suits the European context because the key idea is that there is no one best style of leadership, and situational leaders are those who are able to diagnose the situation, adjust their leadership style and communicate accordingly. They also need to be able to take account of the “performance readiness” – in other words the ability and willingness – of the various members of the team.

National cultural differences are not specifically mentioned in the model, but in my training I always relate situational leadership to what is known about the preferences in each European country for top down or consensus oriented decision making styles, as well as direct or indirect and formal or informal communication in the ways of giving feedback or direction.

Of course, this can be somewhat overwhelming for someone who is new to the European workplace. It is particularly tough for Japanese people who have worked in the more traditional Japanese companies, where people just do as best they can whatever their bosses tell them, whether they are willing or able or not.

But I think Japanese managers have two big advantages. Although this is a generalization and may not apply to all Japanese managers, in my twenty-five years’ experience of working with or in Japanese companies, most of the Japanese people I have met have been humble about their own abilities and also curious about other cultures. This means they are willing to learn and to accept that their usual way of working may have to be adjusted.

This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

A second look at France

I have written previously about the difficulties of doing business in France, particularly the amount of bureaucracy that has to be dealt with. The new French government under Emmanuel Macron has been trying to overcome this image problem by promising to deregulate and lower taxes, particularly for banks. There have even been advertising campaigns promoting the charms of Paris in an attempt to lure banks from London post Brexit.

So far this does not seem to be working for Japanese banks and financial services companies, who are largely choosing either Frankfurt or Amsterdam for their post Brexit EU base and in any case look likely to keep their broader European or EMEA coordination functions in London.

Financial services companies need to be based near where their customers are, so it is not surprising Japanese banks would choose Germany or the Netherlands over France, and not move too much out of the UK for the time being, as there are far more large Japanese companies, regional headquarters, and also Japanese expatriate staff in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands than in France.

I found, through my researches, that the Japanese companies with substantial presence in France reflect France’s traditional strengths of food and drink, imaging technology and fashion and beauty, along with automotive companies, which have a dominant presence across the EMEA region.

The EU Japan trade agreement and partnership will boost trade in the food and automotive sectors so it may well be that more Japanese companies will be looking at France again and French companies will also be trying more actively to do business in Japan.

Nonetheless, I am very reluctant to have a registered company in France, even though it is becoming clear it will be difficult for us to provide training to our clients in France if I do not have a legal entity there.

My researches into Japanese companies in France also revealed that Sony has shrunk its French workforce considerably over the past few years and that reminded me of the incident where the Sony France CEO and HR director were held hostage overnight by the workers of a Sony factory that was being closed down.

France has a long tradition of striking, protest and direct confrontation between workers and employers and citizens and their government. This attitude also impacts the way they do business – the City of London Envoy to the EU described in a recent memo how shocked he was to discover in his meeting with Banque de France that the French wanted a hard, disruptive Brexit, even if it came at a cost to the EU overall, and saw the City of London as adversaries, not partners.

I am not at all surprised by this, nor was it particularly surprising to read that the French military, teachers and local authorities are starting to protest about Macron’s proposed cuts and deregulation. We can expect plenty of strikes, demonstrations and blockades in the months to come.

This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 9th August 2017 and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

Hitachi Rail’s CEO Alistair Dormer on Brexit, speeding up and the need to speak simple English

Hitachi’s rail business is only 5% of the whole group’s turnover, but is growing rapidly and moving from being “double domestic” to a truly global business. Overseas sales are now 83% of turnover, having been 28% of the business in 2012.

Nikkei Business interviewed Alistair Dormer (subscription only, in Japanese), the CEO of Hitachi Rail who is also a Senior Vice President and Executive Officer of the Hitachi Group about his four years as CEO – at a time when the railway business is undergoing major change, with Siemens and Alstom joining forces in Europe for their rail business.

Dormer talks about the importance of being able to scale multilaterally through M&A, with the acquisition of Ansaldo Breda and other companies, which resulted in acquiring customers across 27 countries – 26% of business is now in the UK, 17% in Japan, 10% in Asia Pacific. Hitachi Rail is also moving, like every technology business, into “solutions” adding a services side, including communication technology, software development, signalling systems and operations.

Speed up every aspect

Dormer says the most important thing for Hitachi Rail as a Japanese company was to speed up every aspect. “It is a strength of Hitachi as with other Japanese companies that business advances on a consensus basis, carefully harmonizing in-house planning and business negotiations with partners. This leads to stable quality standards and organizational cohesion, but it is also a weakness in that it takes too much time when you face global competition. The leader needs to be able to make quick decisions and communicate rapidly.”

Of course this is even more difficult when communication and decisions have to be made across long distances such as between the UK and Japan. So Dormer decided the best way was to move people around, to raise the frequency and density of communication. So there has been substantial exchange of people between the factory in Japan and manufacturing bases in UK and Italy.

If there is a substantial geographical and time distance, then people prefer not to have meetings about trivial things, but these details can later become obstacles. So having more regular interaction is necessary. Hitachi Rail thererefore also has regular video confererence and Dormer himself visits sites, holding meetings with 50-80 people to exchange opinions.

Only use simple English

With English as the common language, Dormer (as a native Brit) instituted a rule that only simple English should be used. “When native English speakers are talking, they speed up. It should be easy to say, “I don’t understand, I can’t follow what you’re saying”, but it’s difficult to do this in a teleconference or an important meeting. So then the meeting ends inconclusively and you find out later that people did not understand. So not only should you use simple English, but also I put in a process to confirm understanding after the meeting. The productivity of our meetings has greatly improved as a result”

Hitachi Rail has also introduced common standards across all countries for HR reviews, cost, engineering performance etc. “Each country, the UK and Italy and Japan, have different cultures and ways of doing things, so we did not force conformity, but respected each others’ cultures while working to Hitachi’s values as the common standard.”

Brexit – nobody knows what the future will hold

With regard to Brexit, Dormer says he is repeatedly asked about it, but at the moment there has been no change. “Hitachi has good relations with the UK government. All we can do is continue to ask that companies like us who have their regional base in the UK can continue to access the EU market as seamlessly as possible. There is no choice but to believe this. A transition period is being discussed, so it’s possible the environment will not change for the foreseeable future. However it is still a shock to me on a personal level that the UK made such a decision – even when we knew there was nothing to gain from leaving the EU. There are many people in our offices who were born in the European Union outside the UK, and they are worried. My priority is to reassure them, but the only thing I can say is that nobody knows what the future will hold.”

First decrease in Japanese nationals living in UK since Lehman Shock

The number of Japanese nationals resident in the UK fell by 4.5% in 2016, from 67,997 in 2015 to 64,968 – the first time since 2008-9, when the Lehman Shock hit and numbers dropped from 63,526 to 59,431.

It’s difficult to avoid concluding that the Brexit referendum vote had an immediate psychological impact along with the beginning of a renewed crackdown on non-EU migration. I expect the downward trend to be intensified in 2017-8 as it has become much more expensive and difficult to bring in Japanese expatriate staff from 2017. The non-EU immigration cap has been hit for the third month running in February 2018. It is estimated that the cost of bringing in a Japanese expat has increased from £2151 to £7174 in 2017 (and might double again in later years) after the introduction of the immigrant skills charge of £1000 per year in April 2017. The charge to use the NHS is proposed to rise from £200 to £600 over the next couple of years.

Given that some Japanese companies have hundreds of Japanese expatriates in the UK, this is a significant cost, even though it does not seem to have deterred more non-EU migrants from coming to the UK in 2018 compared to 2017.

Delving further into the Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication’s Statistics Bureau’s statistics, it is clear that other European countries are still seeing significant rises in Japanese nationals as residents – Sweden has seen an increase of 8% from 2015 to 2016, the Netherlands a 7% rise and the two largest Japanese populations after the UK, Germany and France have also seen 3-4% rises, to 44,027 and 41,641 respectively. Belgium and Russia are the only two other countries to record a decrease in Japanese nationals, of 9% to 5,707 and 4% to 2,650 respectively.

Nidec’s Nagamori on the root causes of Japanese corporate scandals.

The founder and President of Nidec Corp, Shigenobu Nagamori has been high profile in the Japanese media (again). As well as a long interview in Diamond magazine about why all 57 of his acquisitions (many in Europe) have been a success, he gives some punchy analysis in his final column for the Nikkei Business magazine on what the root causes of the succession of scandals coming out of corporate Japan.

“It is the top management’s fault if bad news does not reach them. If there is something wrong with the production process or sloppiness in quality control, this is a matter of life or death for a manufacturer. That such important information is not being communicated is because the management is not going to the genba (where the action is) and seeing what is going on for themselves.

4 root causes of scandals at the genba

Nare (becoming used to something) Thinking that a certain level of irregularity won’t be a problem, getting accustomed to it.
Amae (being indulged) – believing that you won’t get found out anyway
Tiredness – when the cost price seems to have reached rock bottom or kaizen has been continuing for a while
Takotsubo (octopus pot – for more uses of this analogy, see our post on octopus appointments) – silos where a problem in one unit is hidden and not communicated to other units

This happens because managers are not ensuring a sense of urgency in the genba. This doesn’t mean they have to keep pressurising employees. They should be making frequent efforts to strengthen and pull up the genba. That’s why they should enter the genba themselves and see for themselves what is going on in R&D and manufacturing, sales. This will naturally lead to a sense of urgency.

Of course managers set targets, but if they don’t know the genba, then these are just words, and feel very distant to the genba.

The need for “hands on”, “micromanagement” and “making responsible without giving away responsibility”

Hands on means the genba solves problems with the management alongside. Not just throwing problems at them.

Micromanagement is that managers make decisions about all the issues in the genba. When I acquire a company that is in trouble, in order to reconstruct it, I check purchasing for even 1 yen. Some people say this will undermine the ability to think for themselves but it’s quite the opposite. It is to make the employees think, come up with suggestions and work alongside managers to review it. Not just get told, in a one way fashion.

“Making responsible without giving away responsibility” means that I delegate authority, but I don’t just leave people up to it. Otherwise the genba logic just becomes stronger and they fail to see what is appropriate overall. So delegate, but regularly check, very thoroughly.

The importance of developing generalists

It’s also important to develop executives. Although there is a tendency in Japan at the moment to reject generalists, it’s no good if someone only knows one business area and has no idea about other parts of the business. While people are young, they should experience management in different divisions in order to become proper executives.

That’s why I am always visiting our subsidiaries around the world. We have 300 companies and over 100,000 employees so I can’t do this by myself. So I get other people like our CSO (Chief Sales Officer) to travel around too. I am visiting somewhere pretty much every week. If managers had this attitude, the morale of the genba will also improve. You cannot take it easy.

The positives and negatives for investors of local pride and identity

I was working in Catalonia just before the referendum there in 2017 and shortly after that I was in the North Rhine -Westphalia area in Germany, where people were still digesting the results of the German elections. These trips, as well as the impact of Brexit in the UK, have made me aware of how important local – not just national – identities are for businesses to thrive.

The majority of Japanese companies based in Spain are in the Catalonia region, and this choice of location is not surprising as Catalonia has been one of the most prosperous and industrialized areas of the country, offering easy land access to France and several international ports. It turns out that one of the factors behind the Catalan independence movement is a resentment amongst the people of the region that their taxes are being transferred to prop up poorer parts of Spain.

The freedom of capital, labour, goods and services in the European single market creates competition between not just countries but also regions within those countries to attract investment from business. The European Union tries to prevent this turning into a “race to the bottom” in terms of cost of labour, tax rates and cost of capital by having tough regulations on labour standards, cracking down on tax avoidance and limiting how far member governments can subsidise business investment.

Before 2008 the system seemed to work well – labour flowed to the more prosperous parts of the EU where there were job shortages and capital flowed from those regions (and from Japan) to regions where the cost of labour was lower.

In a free market, this should have eventually led to an equalization of living standards across the European Union. However, the Lehman Shock, combined with the influx of new member countries from Eastern Europe meant that capital flows returned to the safer havens of Western and Northern Europe and workers in southern and eastern Europe left their home towns to find work elsewhere in greater numbers than before.

The tension this caused is particularly apparent in Germany. The anti-immigrant Alternativ fur Deutschland had very little support in the recent elections in the prosperous North Rhine-Westphalia region – which has one the highest concentration of Japanese companies in Europe. But it had strong support in former communist eastern Germany, where the continuing gap in living standards with the west causes resentment, fuelled by worries that immigrants from other eastern European countries are further eroding wages.

For Japanese companies considering investment in Europe, local sensitivities add another layer of complexity in choosing a company to acquire or a locational base. However, if Japanese companies show strong local commitment, the local employees will respond with equal loyalty and commitment too. This is very clear in the pride and loyalty of employees at Japanese automotive plants which have been operating for over 25 years in some of most deprived parts of the UK, who have expressed their determination to succeed despite Brexit.

This article was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 8th November 2017 and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

Category: Japanese business in Europe