More than half of the Top 30 largest Japanese companies in Europe are also in the Top 50 Japanese listed companies for CSR according to the Toyo Keizai. Which is reassuring, although there are some notable no-shows and laggers.

Fujifilm (#29 of our Top 30 in Europe) leads the CSR rankings and Canon, Ricoh, Denso and Bridgestone are all in the top 10.

Toyo Keizai has published the 10th edition of its annual CSR research into 1325 listed Japanese companies and previewed the top 700 of these in its online magazine, from which we have extracted the rankings for the Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe and in the UK.

Rankings are based on evaluations made in 4 categories of:

1. Human resources – Family friendly policies, diversity (gender, age, LGBT, disability etc), health and safety, graduate retention rates – and whether there are any non-Japanese executives
2. Environment
3. Corporate governance  – whether there is a CSR executive, any evidence of corruption or cartels, values and vision, risk management, crisis management policies
4. Sociality – volunteering (including overseas) , NPO/NGO alliances, ISO standards

Top 30 companies in Europe that are not in the CSR top 700 include some surprises – Nippon Sheet Glass (Pilkington), Fast Retailing and Yazaki (which is privately owned anyway).

Hitachi has fallen from #39 to 147 and Olympus has improved to reach #175 from 263 in 2015 – which seems to imply its post-scandal clean up is working (although it seems Olympus is now suing Michael Woodford and one other UK director for repayment of some pension funds, so clearly the battle is not over yet).

Toshiba has fallen to #52 from #14, unsurprisingly given its recent governance problems.  Toyo Keizai notes that other slippages such as Denso from #3 to #6 and Toyota from #8 to #16 are largely to do with delays or non disclosure in progress with gender diversity, specifically, women in management positions.  Nissan slipped from #5 to #11 due to governance issues.

Companies which scored the best on Human Resources metrics that are also in the Top 30 European companies are Sony, Nissan, Fujifilm, Japan Tobacco and Toshiba.  Best scores on environment were Nissan, Daikin, Bridgestone, Ricoh, Canon, Honda, Denso, Toyota, Toshiba, Sony, Fujifilm, Konica Minolta and Suntory.  Best scores on governance were Ricoh, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Konica Minolta, Bridgestone, Sony, Asahi Glass and Honda.

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Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2021-10-15.