Reputation

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.

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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.

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:

Frequent communication between family members
Treat family members who are employees the same way as other employees in terms of company regulations
Don’t withhold information for family only, be transparent in management
Don’t appoint a successor from the family if there is noone suitable
Keep family assets and company assets separate
When there is a generation changeover, keep criticisms to yourself
Avoid too many family members as employees
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.

Nissan and Ghosn – the cycle of coups d’état reaches back to the 1960s

I always prefer coincidence or cock-up to conspiracy, and former journalist and PR consultant Masaki Kubota clearly feels the same way, judging by the first few paragraphs of his article on Carlos Ghosn and Nissan in Diamond magazine.

As he says, in his years as a journalist, it was the standard defence of any Japanese executive caught up in a scandal that it was a conspiracy of people out to get him.

With Ghosn, you could easily claim, as many have, that this was a conspiracy, born of some kind of alliance between insiders at Nissan who wanted to get rid of Ghosn, his ex-wife and the Japanese government, and this kind of accusation is handy both for Ghosn and the French government or Renault who might have wanted Ghosn to continue to be influential.

But then Kubota does a classic kishotenketsu twist, pointing out the history of Nissan, going back to Ghosn’s installation and even before, is one of a cycle of coup d’etats.

Starting with the most recent history, of the inspection scandals – the exposure of the problem was a way of resisting the inspection system that Ghosn’s management team had introduced, shortly after Saikawa (identified as one of Ghosn’s team) became the new President of Nissan. It was in effect an abortive coup d’état.

Going further back to 1999 the then President Yoshikazu Hanawa was in negotiations with Daimler Chrysler and Ford but instead installed three Renault executives, without even consulting the previous Presidents who were advisors to the company at the time. “It was a kind of a coup d’état” the Nikkei said at the time.

Purging the Don

Even further back, to the 1980s, when the Chairman and former President for 16 years from 1957 was Katsuji Kawamata, there was a coup which led to the purge of union power at Nissan in Japan. It was well known that Kawamata gained his power through cooperating with the Nissan group labour union leader Ichiro Shioji. But then in 1984, Shioji, who was seen as the main obstacle to Nissan opening its factory in Sunderland UK and before that in the US, was hit by a scandal – photos appeared in the weekly magazine Focus, of Shioji on a yacht with a beautiful young woman. Criticism of Shioji, as “the Don”, mounted and he resigned on 22^nd February 1986. The Nikkei reported on this as “the 2.22 coup d’état” a reference to the 26^th February Incident, a failed coup attempt in Japan in 1936. It was said that the power behind the 2.22 coup was Takashi Ishihara who was in favour of global expansion, and was the President at the time.

Ishihara had been involved in an earlier coup, when he was still at managing director level in 1969. Documents were leaked to the media about an incident involving a Nissan microbus. It became clear that this was done in order to purge the upper ranks of the company.

As Kubota says, when there is a fraud in a company, this is often results in a clear out of those in the upper levels of management who are to blame. In fact, this kind of incident has been quite rare at Nissan, so when it happens, it is likely that it is part of a major change in strategic direction. So, Kubota asserts, it is definitely a coup d’état. In Kubota’s experience, it is hard to change a corporate culture that easily, so if Nissan is used to changing strategies by coup d’état, then it will continue to use this mechanism.

Corporate culture will not change just because foreign executives are put in place

Corporate culture will not change just because foreign executives are put in place. Kubota reminds us that for Saikawa to criticize Ghosn so strongly, when Ghosn has not yet been put on trial, is certainly a change from the usual crisis management of Japanese companies.

Kubota sees this singling out of Ghosn by Saikawa, who worked so closely with Ghosn for many years, as a kind of personal insurance.

So where does Saikawa fit in? Kubota has dug out the fact that Saikawa was executive assistant to the President from 1992, Yoshifumi Tsuji. Tsuji had taken over from Yutaka Kume, who had succeeded Ishihara, the instigator of the coup against union Don Shioji. Saikawa was therefore part of the team that survived the Renault coup.

So it goes round. As Kubota puts it, even in the midst of this coup d’état, there will be people wondering whether they will be the next to be stabbed.

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.

Size matters when choosing a Japanese company

Whether you’re looking to work for or supply to a Japanese company, size matters. The most obvious reason being, as bank robber Willie Sutton apparently never said, “that’s where the money is”. That’s why we started our Top 30 Japanese Employers rankings – we’ve found them useful in understanding our customer base and the likely concerns of participants in our seminars.

We use the number of employees as a proxy for size rather than turnover or profit, and although there is a degree of correlation between employee numbers globally and in Europe and overall profit, there are some exceptions.

Toyo Keizai have recently listed up the companies* who made the biggest cumulative profit in the past 10 years and it’s absolutely no surprise that Toyota, one of the biggest companies in Japan and #9 amongst Japanese companies in Europe, made a whopping Y11 trillion ($99bn) cumulative profit from 2007 to 2017, far outstripping NTT and NTT Docomo at #2 and #3 who made less than half that amount. NTT and NTT Docomo are not in our Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe, although another group company, NTT Data, is.

However NTT and NTT Docomo never made a loss, whereas Toyota did go into the red – with a loss of $.8.6bn in 2008/9. Honda, who has had a tough time in Europe (and is #23 in our rankings), has also never made a loss, and accumulated a $36bn profit over the decade. Nissan, who made a loss but was famously turned round by Carlos Ghosn, is 10th largest in Europe in our rankings and has the 6th largest cumulative profit.

I was surprised to see my old employer Mitsubishi Corporation at #5, as they too had some rough patches particularly with losses in the commodity side, but clearly overall the Japanese trading companies have been very profitable, despite their death being heralded every decade – Mitsui is at #9, Itochu at #11, Sumitomo Corp at #14 and Marubeni at #21.

Unsurprisingly, almost none of the Japanese electronics companies feature in the top 30, apart from Canon at #10 and Mitsubishi Electric at #25. Other industries in the top 50 most profitable are automotive (Denso, Bridgestone) and pharmaceutical (Takeda, Astellas) related, and also heavily domestic businesses such as telecommunications (KDDI, SoftBank as well as NTT mentioned above), rail and retail (7&I, Fast Retailing).

Two of the largest Japanese companies in Europe – Fujitsu and Hitachi – are at #69 and #70 – Hitachi’s cumulative profit was heavily dented by the historic loss of $8bn in 2008/9. The largest company in the Europe and Africa region – Sumitomo Electric Industries (due to its labour intensive automotive manufacturing operations) is at #38, with a $6bn cumulative profit.

*Excludes banks, insurance and other financial services companies

“Innovative jam” or Singapore? Foreign Direct Investment post Brexit

A Brexit supporter recently told me that he wanted Brexit to mean the removal of as many tariff and non-tariff barriers as possible, so we would have cheap imports and the UK would become once again “the most prosperous nation on earth, as it had been in the 19th century”. Free trade in the 19th century prodded the British economy of the industrial revolution to the services based economy we are now. But it has taken a century to work through, and we still worry about the impact of globalization on an industrial and agricultural workforce who cannot easily or willingly switch to service sector jobs.

In the 19th century, the flood of cheap imports was paid for by the profits from the UK’s investment in foreign railways and other industries overseas and our management of trade routes – particularly in relation to the British Empire. Up until 2011 the UK continued to pay for its trade deficit by making more money from its overseas investments than foreign investors were making from investments in the UK. Since 2011 the UK is no longer making enough money from its overseas investments to make up the deficit. The current account deficit is financed by the continued growth of foreign investment into the UK on the capital account.

So Brexit supporters have proposed three non-mutually exclusive ways to reinvent 19th century free trade prosperity for the UK, absent an Empire we can exploit. One is to compensate for any loss from no longer being members of the Single Market by making the UK as low cost and deregulated a place to do business as possible to attract more foreign investment (the Singapore option). Another option is for British businesses to expand into further flung overseas territories that they have for some reason been neglecting up until now. Or there is the “innovative jam” option, where we identify manufacturing or services that the UK has comparative advantage in and can export more of.

Japanese investment has been a key component of foreign investment into the UK, with greenfield manufacturing investments in the 1970s and 1980s like Nissan, Toyota and Honda but in the past 20 years has been more to do with acquisition or building up service sector presence such as banking and insurance. Some of the acquisitions built up a supply chain within the Single Market (particularly the automotive parts suppliers such as Denso/Marston/Excelsior, Calsonic Kansei/Llanelli Radiators) and others have been pure service sector market share acquisitions (such as Itochu buying KwikFit) or to buy up creative and technological expertise (Dentsu/Aegis, Softbank/ARM). So apart from the automotive sector, lack of access to the Single Market might not be such a blow to these acquisitions. Nonetheless, I know from my own experience that is not low cost or lack of regulations that are the most attractive for Japanese companies who invested in the UK – they were looking for stability and a skilled workforce, for long term sustainability, not short term profit. Brexit and the loss of regulatory predictability makes the UK less stable, and it also seems we might cut off access to the non-UK EU wide skilled workforce, who make up around 30-40% of the employees of some of my clients.

Alex Brummer, City Editor of the Daily Mail and author of “Britain For Sale – British Companies in Foreign Hands – The Hidden Threat to Our Economy” wrote in the Daily Mail regarding the multibillion dollar writedown arising from the Toshiba profit inflation scandal that “Toshiba shows the foolishness of relying on foreign owners, who put their domestic agenda first, ploughing money into Britain” and “corporate Japan operates to very different accounting and governance standards to Britain” (citing Olympus) and that this should worry the UK because Toshiba has investments in the UK nuclear power industry.

He then goes on to point at Dentsu‘s overtime related suicide scandal (although he doesn’t mention Dentsu’s earlier overcharging scandal) and how Dentsu has bought up Aegis, a UK advertising agency. He asserts that the CEO, who has now resigned, may have taken his eye off the ball due to his global expansion ambitions. He also laments the acquisition by Softbank of Cambridge based chip designer ARM.

“When command and control of our infrastructure, technology and creative industries is passed to decision makers far away, we all suffer.” he concludes. No evidence of this suffering is given. Presumably the worry is that Toshiba will have to pull out of the 50 per cent stake in NuGen it acquired from Spain’s Iberdrola, which is looking at building a 3.6 gigawatt nuclear power plant near Sellafield in Cumbria. No mention is made of Hitachi, who acquired the stakes in Horizon Nuclear Power after German utilities E.ON and RWE pulled out a few years’ ago – and have transferred their global rail HQ to the UK. I’m also not clear how Dentsu’s domestic woes are supposed to impact Dentsu Aegis Network. Nor what the issue might be with Softbank acquiring ARM, as Softbank’s CEO Masayoshi Son has promised to dramatically increase employment in the UK rather than asset strip. The trend I have seen with these acquisitions over the past decade or so is that Japanese companies have given up trying to manage everything from Japan and as with Dentsu Aegis Network, or Hitachi Rail, or Japan Tobacco, the international headquarters has moved to Europe.

I would argue that it is globalization and foreign acquisitions which have forced Japanese companies to become more transparent in many cases (Olympus acquiring Keymed, and thereby whistleblowing CEO Michael Woodford coming on board, or Toshiba making a mess of acquiring Westinghouse and CB&I Stone & Webster), and as a result, Japanese corporate governance is improving, albeit slowly. The majority of corporate governance scandals both in Japan and the UK are in the domestic services sector – certain British retailers for example, or banks – indeed Alex Brummer’s other book is “Bad Banks – Greed, Incompetence and the Next Global Crisis”. It was RBS’s acquisition of ABN Amro, and HSBC’s compliance issues in the USA, Switzerland and Mexico that exposed their lack of proper governance and management capability, and Rolls Royce had to pay fines to US and Brazilian regulators for their corrupt activities there.

Given that the Daily Mail and Alex Brummer are pro Brexit, is the implication that Brexit should not lead as other Brexiteers suggest to the UK becoming the new Singapore, but an opportunity to put an end to any further foreign direct investment in key industries, and maybe even try to kick out the current foreign investors in our infrastructure, technology and creative industries? At least that way our corruption and incompetence will be purely domestic and less prone to being exposed globally, because I would imagine other investor countries will retaliate by blocking British investment and erecting non-tariff barriers too, which might make doing any deals with China or Japan tricky. And if we don’t concede on immigration, a trade partnership seems unlikely with India, so that leaves other former colonies in the Commonwealth and the Anglosphere, for whom I doubt 19th century relationships with the UK feature much in their visions for the 21st century, with the possible exception of Trump.

Or there’s the “innovative” jam option. We will have to find alternative export sectors to build up, because the export sector we really had an advantage in after decades of free trade and EU membership – providing the professional services to support multinational industries (law, design, IT, engineering, research & development, finance, insurance, consulting, advertising, accounting, education) will fade away. If this kind of Brexit nativism really takes hold, multinationals will take their business elsewhere, swiftly followed by most of the EU professionals themselves. Still, at least we get back control.

Mitsubishi Motors & Nissan – Is Ghosn prepared to try to nail jelly to the wall?

When it comes to the Mitsubishi group of companies (keiretsu), I did almost literally write the book (A History of Mitsubishi Corporation in London: 1915 to Present Day), although my focus was more on the way the pre-war Mitsubishi Goshi evolved into Mitsubishi Corporation, the trading company, and more specifically, its London office.

It’s generally perceived in Japan that the Mitsubishi keiretsu has been the most cohesive and robust of all the keiretsu (Mitsui, Sumitomo, Fuyo being the other main ones) but as you might imagine, the current Mitsubishi Motors fuel economy data manipulation scandal has put this to the test.

According to Nikkei Business magazine (April 22^nd edition, not available online), the cracks are appearing. Whereas in the previous Mitsubishi Motors crises (recalls for various defects in the 2000s) Mitsubishi Heavy, Mitsubishi Corporation and Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ all stepped in and financial support came from Tokio Marine, Mitsubishi Electric and Mitsubishi Materials as well, this time seems different.

Even now, having been hit by the commodity price slump, the automotive sector remains an important profit generator for Mitsubishi Corporation as it is involved in the sale and financing of vehicles in Asia and Europe as well as engine manufacture. Mitsubishi Corporation also seconds quite a few employees to Mitsubishi Motors, including the current Chairman and CEO Osamu Masuko.

Other Mitsubishi companies do not have such ties. Even though Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings supplies products to the automotive sector, its main customers are Toyota and Nissan. Mitsubishi Paper also said “we are busy with our own affairs”.

It’s not just about whether the companies have business together, points out the Nikkei. It’s also an issue of corporate governance. The Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group has been reducing cross shareholdings, where appropriate. Mitsubishi Corporation is also checking shareholdings regularly for rationale and yield and disposing of them as necessary. Presumably it is hard to justify “Protecting the Three Diamonds” as the sole reason for support, to external directors and shareholders.

The Nikkei sees this as a chance for the Mitsubishi group to embark on a delayed restructure [the article was written before Nissan stepped in to acquire a 34% share]. In previous restructurings, there was a discussion about selling off the largely domestic ‘mini-car’ business, so this might be finally realised.

A more recent article in the Nikkei Asian Review points out that a key question is whether Nissan’s CEO Carlos Ghosn’s aggressive brand of reform will suit the corporate culture at Mitsubishi Motors “where change is not exactly a buzzword”. The question I have is what the corporate culture of Mitsubishi Motors actually is, other than a reluctance to change. The lack of a clear definition of values and vision may indeed be one of the causes of the repeated scandals. There are the Mitsubishi Three Principles, but not all Mitsubishi companies showcase them, and they lack the strong philosophy and toolkit of something like the Toyota Way.

Along with my official book on Mitsubishi in London I wrote a further unpublishable chapter, called “The Vague Company”. It talked about the benefits and difficulties of having a vague, unspoken corporate culture. Employees can enjoy the sense of being treated like adults, to work out for themselves what the right “way” is, but it makes global expansion – particularly post-merger integration – highly frustrating, when new, hybrid cultures need to develop. As one frustrated American employee at another Mitsubishi group company said to me the other day “I can’t get a handle on what the Mitsubishi Way is”. It is, as we say in British English, like trying to nail jelly to a wall. I suspect Ghosn may quickly tire of this and use his hammer in more brutally effective ways.

For more on Mitsubishi Motors’ future, I recommend this blog post by my old friend and former head of corporate communications at Mitsubishi Motors in the Daimler Chrysler days, Jochen Legewie: http://www.cnc-communications.com/blog/the-future-of-mitsubishi-motors/

For more on Mitsubishi corporate culture, I have gathered some resources on Pinterest here

Japanese boards in Europe should reflect their customers, employees and community

I have just completed the first phase of research into how diverse the European subsidiary boards of the biggest Japanese companies in Europe are, both in terms of the nationality mix of Japanese and European directors, and also the number of women on the board.

More boards in Japan had women on them than in Europe, which is surprising if you were expecting boards to reflect the employee mix – particularly the pipeline of managers coming through the ranks of an organisation – as there are without doubt more women employees and proportionally more women managers in Japanese companies in Europe than there are in Japan.

The proportion of directors with European nationalities on the board of Japanese subsidiaries varied wildly from none in the case of Toshiba, Sharp and Fast Retailing (the Uniqlo subsidiary in the UK), through to 100% in the case of Asahi Glass, Bridgestone, Canon and Nidec. So national diversity does not seem to be influenced by which industry the company is in. This also means that what to me is the most compelling case for a diverse board, that it should reflect the customers it is serving, is not the key factor I thought it would be.

20 years’ ago, becoming less reliant on Japanese customers abroad as well as in Japan, was the driving force for many Japanese companies embarking on “kokusaika” (“internationalization”). Canon was a pioneer then in appointing Europeans to senior positions in overseas subsidiaries and does as a consequence appear to have fared better than other companies in the consumer electronics sector, both in Japan and in Europe.

The current favoured path to globalization for Japanese companies is through M&A rather than growing international businesses and executives internally, and the major acquisitions of the past decades account for the diverse boards of Asahi Glass (who acquired Glaverbel) and other companies that still have a high proportion of European directors such as Fujitsu (International Computers Ltd), Nomura (Lehman Brothers) and NSG (Pilkington).

There is some sectoral influence. For example, the financial services industry is under intense scrutiny by European regulators who have the power to approve board appointments. They expect directors to have deep understanding and experience of local markets – something which not many Japanese executives can claim.

Both Fujitsu and Hitachi have substantial public sector oriented businesses in the UK (government services, nuclear power and rail) which means that they not only need to meet the diversity requirements of government purchasing but also gain acceptance of the communities in which they operate. For example, the board of a Japan-owned UK utility recently advertised for a director, with a requirement that applicants be a customer of that utility.

For smaller Japanese companies, or those which are just starting in Europe, it is tempting to stick with a small board with just a couple of non-resident Japanese directors, but as boards come under pressure to have greater transparency and better governance in Europe, appointing local directors from the start should lead to better relations with regulators, customers and employees.

(This article first appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in December 2015 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.)

The Olympus scandal – has anything changed since then?

Unfortunately Michael Woodford did not answer the question in the title of the talk, which he gave to the Japan Society this week. It was pretty much the same talk I heard 3 years ago, only even more melodramatic and self dramatizing. But from what he said, I assume his answer would be that nothing has changed, if loyalty to seniors in Japanese companies continues as an excuse to cover up fraud. And certainly, with the recent frauds and cover ups in Toshiba, Asahi Kasei and Toyo Tire and Rubber, it’s hard not to worry that there is something rotten at the heart of Japanese corporate governance.

Woodford rather let his (understandably bitter) personal feelings towards former Olympus Chairman Kikukawa get in the way of two key points I felt. Firstly that Kikukawa was in turn covering up for his predecessor and his predecessor’s predecessor’s mistakes – it was not just about preserving his prestige and his (for a Japanese President surprisingly high) salary. So many Japanese corporate scandals turn out to have roots in previous generations, making it extremely difficult and perilous for successors to do anything about them, as the Japanese people sitting near me at the dinner afterwards pointed out. Secondly, that Kikukawa was able to get all the other directors and employees in the know to collude, not just out of their personal loyalty to him, but their fear that if the fraud was exposed, the consequences of the shame upon them and on Olympus would mean the end not only of their careers but of the company and all its 1000s of employees’ livelihoods.

The fact that Olympus survived is actually a vindication of Woodford’s approach, of public confession and resignations. But he is so insistent on making himself out to be a martyr, abused by “uncle” Kikukawa and threatened by yakuza, who nonetheless loves Japan (he kept insisting), that he rather lost the governance argument in all the embroidery of his story.

I asked him at the dinner afterwards if, rather than be a lone crusader, he had tried to get any of the Olympus directors that he says he knew as friends for 30 years or his other corporate friends in Japan (he was alerted to the fraud by a Japanese senior executive in another company) to advise him what to do, even work with him to get the problem sorted, but he said they all told him to shut up. Actually, I felt a sneaking sympathy towards them by the end of the evening.

Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2022-12-12.

Category: Reputation