Honda job losses in UK widens gap with Toyota, Nissan in Europe

This post is also available in: Japanese

Honda announced on 25th March 2014 that it would be closing car plant 2 in its Swindon UK factory with a loss of 340 permanent jobs, due to slower than expected sales growth in Europe. This follows on from over 500 redundancies last year, and looks to bring Honda’s total employee level even further below that of Toyota and Nissan in Europe.

Honda’s ranking in the top 30 Japanese companies in Europe (table below is revised from an earlier posting) remains unchanged, but this latest round may mean that Honda loses the #14 spot to Takeda (a new entrant).

Takeda, Japan’s biggest pharmaceutical company, qualifies for the top 30 thanks to its acquisition of Nycomed in 2011. The other new entrant (thank you to our friends at Lucite for pointing this out) is Mitsubishi Chemical Holding, the parent of Mitsubishi Chemical, Mitsubishi Rayon, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma and Mitsubishi Plastics.

The restructuring at Sony in the past year, globally and in Europe has also had an impact on its ranking, falling from #4 to #5.

One further addition to our statistics, by request from a former colleague at Fujitsu, are estimates of what proportion of employees are in the Japan organisation. This is indeed interesting, as it further highlights how global the companies are, and how over or under the average size they are in Europe.

We had already compiled some of this, but such estimates have been made a lot more difficult by the increase in holding company structures in Japan. Holding companies had been banned in Japan for 50 years after the war, as the Occupation government tried to break up the “zaibatsu” groupings it felt had supported the military-fascistic regime in Japan.

Company groupings did nonetheless re-emerge, and the usual way their financial results and employee numbers were reported was to give figures for consolidated (renketsu, including group companies domestic and overseas) and parent company (tantai). With individual companies, tantai numbers were a fairly good proxy for how many people were employed in Japan. However, the holding company structure often means that 99% of the employees globally are in consolidated companies, and the tantai/parent only has a hundred or so staff.

So for example, Fujifilm Holdings covers both Fujifilm and Fuji Xerox, and 60 or so other companies as Fujifilm has diversified significantly from camera film making. The 18,500 estimate for employees in Japan represents the sum of Fujifilm and Fuji Xerox employees in Japan, so should be seen as the “at least” minimum figure for how many employees actually are in Japan.

So with those further caveats, here’s the new ranking. Thanks to those who helped, and please keep the suggestions rolling in!:

Rank	Company	Total employees (consolidated)	% in Japan	% in Europe or EMEA	Employees in Europe or EMEA
1	Fujitsu	173,000	62%	18%	31,000
2	Toyota	333,498	21%	6%	20,051
3	Ricoh	107,431	37%	17%	17,850
4	Canon	197,000	36%	8%	16,000
5	Sony	146,600	38%	10%	14,953
6	Nissan	160,530	15%	9%	14,500
7	Asahi Glass	54,000	12%	26%	14,200
8	Denso	132,276	29%	10%	13,000
9	NSG	29,300	16%	42%	12,200
10	Toshiba	206,087	55%	6%	11,562
11	Sumitomo Electric Group	206,323	2%	6%	11,500
12	Hitachi	323,000	66%	4%	11,500
13	Panasonic	293,742	40%	4%	10,500
14	Honda	180,000	13%	4%	8,000
15	Takeda	30,481	22%	25%	7,620
16	NTT Data	61,000	18%	10%	6,000
17	NYK	53,192	16%	10%	5,222
18	Fujifilm Holdings	80,322	23%	6%	5,000
19	Olympus	32,937	9%	14%	4,500
19	Mitsubishi Chemical Holding	55,000	78%	8%	4,500
21	Astellas	17,454	47%	25%	4,300
22	Nomura	27,956	57%	13%	3,618
23	Sharp	50,644	48%	5%	2,674
24	Daiichi Sankyo	32,000	29%	8%	2,500
25	Kao	33,350	66%	7%	2,400
26	Seiko Epson	73,639	25%	3%	2,153
26	Omron	35,411	32%	6%	2,000
27	NEC	102,375	79%	2%	1,800
29	Horiba	5,787	40%	29%	1,700
30	Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ	36,499	78%	4%	1,500
	TOTAL	3,270,834	37%	11%	264,303