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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 |
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