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mitsubishi corporation

Home / Posts Tagged "mitsubishi corporation"

Tag: mitsubishi corporation

Mitsubishi Corporation – a microcosm of the challenges facing Japanese business

The death of the Japanese trading company and the “keiretsu” (company grouping) model has been repeatedly announced over the nearly thirty years since I started working for leading trading company Mitsubishi Corporation and researching their history. But when the Nikkei newspaper runs a three part series on whether Mitsubishi Corporation’s business model is bust, (as they do regularly) it’s worth a look, as Mitsubishi Corporation’s doings are closely watched by the rest of Japanese business.

Digital speed

Part one of the Nikkei series deals with the digital revolution and how it might disintermediate middlemen like Mitsubishi Corp. It notes that Mitsubishi Corp is likely to announce a record profit for 2018/9, but calls Mitsubishi Corp’s legacy a “heavy burden” in trying to find a new digital way to do business.

It looks at how young Mitsubishi employees are scouring Shanghai and Guangzhou for new technologies in convenience stores that they can bring back to Japan.  Mitsubishi Corporation turned Lawson, a convenience store chain in Japan, into a fully owned subsidiary in 2017, partly in response to the losses made on its traditional commodities trading business. But convenience stores themselves are now being threatened by Amazon and China’s Alibaba.

In the mid term plan announced last autumn, Mitsubishi Corp set up a special cross-company structure to look at communications and data [pretty sure we had something like that when I worked there 25 years’ ago, but anyway] and appointed an executive from the energy division (one of the traditional powerful factions at Mitsubishi Corp) as Chief Digital Officer.  “Other trading companies are not our competitors any more” says a senior Mitsubishi Corp executive.  Instead they are looking at SoftBank, who have double the profit and double the share price of Mitsubishi Corporation – a reverse of 10 years’ ago.

The concern, as with so many older Japanese companies, is the speed of change. President Kakiuchi syas he wants to decide within 3 years how to participate in the digital economy – but is that fast enough, the Nikkei asks.

The Three Diamond brand

“Mitsubishi Heavy Industries can fix it by themselves” said a senior executive at Mitsubishi Corporation in September 2018. A subsidiary of Mitsubishi Heavy, Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation was facing delays in developing its Mitsubishi Regional Jet and needed further investment. The main branches of the Mitsubishi Three Diamonds, the core of the Friday Meeting are Mitsubishi Corporation, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and MUFG Bank.  It was usual in the past for Mitsubishi Corporation to come to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ rescue [often grudgingly I would say] but this time they did not step in.

President Kakiuchi says Mitsubishi Corporation’s relations with other Mitsubishi companies are “no different from with normal independent companies” and has been reducing cross shareholdings.

The Mitsubishi Motors factory which started production in Indonesia in February 2019 of the Nissan Livina also illustrates how ties are weakening.  The factory is a joint venture between Mitsubishi Motors and Mitsubishi Corporation. Mitsubishi Motors was originally an offshoot of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Mitsubishi Corporation has been a frequent partner either in dealerships or production, but Mitsubishi Motors turned to Nissan for investment when it was hit by a fuel emissions scandal in 2016 and is now in a triple alliance with Nissan and Renault.  Up until then, the Mitsubishi group had always bailed it out, but repeated scandals meant they felt their fingers had been burned too often.  “To be frank, we have no role to play in this” said a Mitsubishi Corporation executive on the arrest of Ghosn, even though Mitsubishi Corporation had increased its investment in Mitsubishi Motors from 10% to 20% in 2018.  Mitsubishi Motors was selling around 1.2m vehicles a year, and the view was it had to enter an alliance, manufacturing 100 million a year to survive.

Chiyoda Corporation, a spin off from Mitsubishi Oil, asked Mitsubishi Corporation for financial support last year on a loss made on a US LNG plant construction joint venture. The President of Chiyoda Corporation, Masaji Santo, is a former Mitsubishi Corporation employee.  Mitsubishi Corporation was not only the lead shareholder in the LNG plant but was going to be a customer of the LNG plant, so insisted on a low construction cost, which was resulting in Chiyoda making a loss.  President Kakiuchi has said “we will do what we can to support” but is still considering the pros and cons.

Retaining young employees

“I didn’t want to feel regret” said a young employee in his twenties, who left Mitsubishi Corporation after a few years, to join an IT company, citing the difference in the speed of decision making between the two companies.  Mitsubishi Corporation has always been one of the favourites for the elite graduates of Japan, but recently it has dropped in the popularity rankings for Tokyo and Kyoto University graduates, losing out to foreign consultancies like McKinsey.

Graduates who want to make a difference quickly are avoiding trading companies, experts say. One reason is the continuing seniority based promotion system. It took around 20 years to become a general manager until recently, but now Mitsubishi Corporation has reformed its personnel system for the first time in 20 years, to allow capable employees to take on responsibility regardless of age.  Performance based systems and evaluations have been introduced at certain management grades, setting compensation on complexity of the job role and results. Young employees are polishing their management skills with overseas postings.

The Nikkei cites the example of a 33 year old employee posted to the Cote D’Ivoire, who started a solar panel energy project. A Tsukumo Fund has also been set up, to invest up to Y500m in any ideas that employees have which pass certain criteria, even if they don’t have their boss’s approval.

This last point is key to me – it was always possible to have a lot of autonomy, become a manager overseas at a young age and start new projects at Mitsubishi Corporation if you were capable enough, but you needed your manager and the rest of the hierachy’s support – and that took a lot of time.

As the Nikkei says, Mitsubishi Corporation is a microcosm of the Japanese business world. The lifetime employment, seniority based promotion system worked well in the post war era, but now with an ageing, shrinking workforce, companies have to become more flexible to attract young people and encourage innovation.

 

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Why work for a Japanese company? (#1) Corporate Social Responsibility

For most Japanese companies, despite recent changes to corporate governance and the occasional scandal, the main motivation is the long term survival of the firm, not shareholder value maximisation.

Obviously you have to make some money to invest back into the company to survive, but above all longevity means being a good citizen in the environment and communities you operate in. There are some exceptions to this of course, but by and large, Japanese companies are pretty sincere about corporate social responsibility, to the point where I used to joke when I worked in corporate communications in a Japanese IT company, that if we didn’t watch out, our mission statement would be identical to every other Japanese technology company’s mission statement as it could be summarised as “contributing to society through innovation”.

So if you are looking to work for a company that will be supportive of your wish to make a positive contribution to society, then you may find Japanese companies congenial places to work.

Some are more active in CSR than others, so when Toyo Keizai has published its latest rankings by industry, we matched these to our Top 30 Europe, UK and Germany largest Japanese employers rankings and put them in rank order as below.

As Toyo Keizai points out, it is easier for manufacturers to score highly in their CSR rankings, which is why they dominate the top 50 overall, and also why Toyo Keizai publishes rankings by industry, to ensure like for like comparisons are made.  Banking and financial services are not included in their analysis. Toyo Keizai explains its scoring system (in Japanese) here.  It has around 150 criteria, across the categories of diversity (gender, age, disability), environment, corporate governance and social contribution.

  • Fujifilm – #1 overall and #1 in pulp/paper/chemicals
  • Canon #4 overall and #1 in electronics and fine engineering
  • Denso #8 overall and #1 in automotive
  • Ricoh #9 overall and #3 in electronics and fine engineering
  • Konica Minolta #12 overall and #4 in electronics and fine engineering
  • Honda #14 overall and #2 in automotive
  • Nissan #17 overall and #3 in automotive
  • Daiichi Sankyo #25 overall and #1 in pharmaceuticals
  • Toyota #28 overall and #4 in automotive
  • Fujitsu #30 overall and #9 in electronics and fine engineering
  • Astellas #34 overall and #2 in pharmaceuticals
  • Sumitomo Rubber 36th overall and #2 in oil/rubber/glass/ceramics
  • Mitsubishi Corporation #42 overall and #1 among trading companies
  • Lixil 44th overall and #1 in metal products
  • Sony #45 overall and #12 in electronics and fine engineering
  • Nidec #49 overall and #13 in electronics and fine engineering
  • Takeda #50 overall and #4 in pharmaceuticals
  • Sumitomo Electric Industries #52 overall and #2 in metal products
  • Itochu #55 overall and #2 among trading companies
  • Panasonic #57 overall and #15 in electronics and fine engineering
  • NYK #58 overall and #1 in logistics
  • Japan Tobacco 60th overall, 3rd amongst food companies
  • Brother Industries #71 overall and #16 in electronics and fine engineering
  • Sumitomo Corporation – #73 overall and #3 amongst trading companies
  • NTT Data #75 overall and #4 in telecommunications
  • Olympus #84 overall and #17 in electronics and fine engineering
  • Dentsu #95 overall and #2 out of service sector companies
  • Sumitomo Heavy Industries #138 overall and #11 amongst machinery companies
  • Calsonic Kansei #138 overall and #18 in automotive
  • Fast Retailing (Uniqlo) #531 overall and #19 out of 20 amongst retailers

 

 

 

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Japanese automotive companies represent 1/3 of top 30 Japanese employers in the UK

Fujitsu continues to be the largest Japanese employer in the UK despite recent restructuring.  We’ve added Sumitomo Rubber to the list, following its recent acquisition of UK tyre wholesaler and retailer Micheldever.  Along with Kwik Fit, another UK tyre dealer and car servicing company is owned by Itochu at #3, this means that over a third of the companies in the list are automotive or have a substantial automotive component to their business.

We’ve also revised upwards our estimate of the total number of Mitsubishi Corporation employees, having confirmed from various sources that its main subsidiary in the UK, Princes, the foods company, has around 3000 of its 8000 employees in its UK operations.

The top 30 now cover around 80,000 of the 140,000 employees that Japanese companies in the UK employ.  Individual profiles of each company, including trends in employment, regional headquarters, European organisation and CSR and diversity analyses are available – please contact pernilledotrudlinatrudlinconsultingdotcom

Rank Company UK employees 2016
1 Fujitsu 9,905
2 Nissan 7,657
3 Itochu 6,697
4 Honda 4,565
5 Ricoh 3,702
6 Mitsubishi Corp 3,482
7 Hitachi 3,317
8 Toyota 3,233
9 Sony 2,937
10 Canon 2,744
11 Dentsu 2,571
12 Nomura 2,468
13 NSG 2,167
14 Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Goup 2,100
15 Denso 1,925
16 NYK Group 1,919
17 Mitsui Sumitomo & Aioi Nissay Dowa 1,867
18 Yazaki 1,846
19 Calsonic Kansei 1,729
20 SoftBank 1,700
21 Sumitomo Rubber 1,574
22 JT Group 1,473
23 Sumitomo Corporation 1,366
24 Fujifilm Holdings 1,292
25 Brother Industries 1,174
26 Olympus 1,157
27 Fast Retailing 1,100
28 Unipres 1,095
29 Konica Minolta 1,055
30 NSK 866
TOTAL 80,683

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What Japanese banks, trading companies look for in graduate hiring

The graduate hiring process in Japan reaches a peak towards the end of the year, as the naitei (informal offers) from the big firms have mostly been issued, and the smaller firms and the unlucky graduates desperately try to find solace in each others’ arms.  The process is meant to start in April, when students put on identical suits and attend countless company presentations and interviews, thereby pretty much wiping the final year out in terms of getting any studying done.  Japan’s universities mostly function on the American credit system, so there is not the pressure of ‘finals’ as you get in British universities, however Japan’s academics regularly complain about the damage done to the educational experience by the system.   There have been attempts to move the start date to August, so that students can do some studying in the first term, but unfortunately, with a shortage of skilled labour, it’s too tempting for most firms not to try to buck the system.

The Nikkei Business magazine ran a series in December to guide students through the process, explaining what financial services companies and trading companies are looking for and offering.  I thought I would share it, as it gives a flavour of the corporate culture of these elite employers who are active outside Japan.  I was interested to see how much better paid on average the trading companies’ recruits are than the financial services companies, and that a global mindset is mentioned regularly amongst the financial services, but not by the trading companies – presumably a global outlook is taken for granted.

In terms of overseas experience, the Nikkei says that some of the bigger banks send out several hundred people a year to overseas postings, and this is not just to support Japanese companies overseas, but increasingly to build business with local companies too.  English ability is not compulsory, but likely to be offered as training after entry.

The image of trading company employees is that they have to be able to speak English, are strong drinkers and sporty.  The trading companies themselves say English ability is not compulsory and there are even some naitei offers to people who don’t have a passport.  However all trading companies point out that they usually expect one of the three rotations in the first 10 or so years to be overseas.  The trading companies say it is not necessary to drink, but obviously it’s a bit awkward if your counterpart is a brewery.  Sportiness is not actively sought, but it’s true that on campus recruitment by employees may well focus on students who were in the same club as them.

Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ

Offers naitei to 1300 graduates, starting salary is Y205,000 (around £1200) a month. Average salary of all employees is Y7.91m (around £46K). They are looking for healthy curiousity, and eagerness to take up challenges

Mizuho Financial Group

Offers naitei to 1920 graduates.  Starting salary the same as BTMU. Average salary of all employees is Y7.38m (around £43K).  They are looking for intellectual curiousity, a global mindset and dynamism.

Sumitomo Mitsui Banking

Offers naitei to 1800 graduates.  Starting salary the same as BTMU and Mizuho. Average salary of all employees is Y8.79m (£51K).  They are looking for people who are good at building relationships and have a global awareness.

Nomura

Offers naitei to 600 graduates.  Starting salary is Y232,300 a month (£1350).  Average salary of all employees is Y11.93m (£69K).  They are looking for people with ambition, honesty and flexibility.

Daiwa

Offers naitei to around 690 graduates. Starting salary is Y240,000 a month (£1395). Average salary of all employees is Y10.02m (£58K). They are also looking for honesty but also a strong spirit of enquiry

Sompo Japan Nipponkoa

Offers naitei to around 750 graduates.  Starting salary is Y237,860 a month (£1383).  Average salary of all employees is Y6.6m  (£38K).  SJNK is looking for “ability to stand on your own feet”

 

Trading companies:

Itochu

Offers naitei to around 142 graduates (out of 7000 applications). Starting salary is Y240,000 (£1395). Average salary of all employees is Y13.95m (£81K).  They are looking for honesty and optimism

Mitsubishi Corporation

Offers naitei to around 160 graduates (out of 6000 applications).  Starting salary is the same as the other trading companies.  Average salary of all employees is Y13.75m (£80K). They are looking for trustworthiness, strength and intellectual ability.

Mitsui

Offer naitei to around 120-150 graduates (out of 6000 applications). Same starting salary as the other trading companies.  Average salary of all employees is Y13.61m (£79K).  They are looking for intellectual curiosity, ambition, ability to develop yourself

Sumitomo Corporation

Offer naitei to around 130 graduates (out of 7000 applications).  Same starting salary as the others.  Average salary of all employees is Y13m (£76K).  They are looking for ability to innovate, execute and collaborate

Marubeni

Offer naitei to around 122 graduates (out of 7700 applications).  Same starting salary as the others.  Average salary of all employees is Y13.06m (£76K).  They are looking for people who stand up for themselves and don’t run away (!)

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Japanese companies need to pull up younger burdock roots if they really want to grow globally

Along with “tako tsubo” (octopus pot), another Japanese concept “gobou nuki” (plucking out burdock roots) used in HR has been deemed harmful to corporate Japan’s global prospects.

The term has been used frequently in the Japanese media recently, according to Masahiro Kotosaka, an ex McKinsey consultant now at Ritsumeikan University.  In a recent article in Nikkei Business Online he points out that the recent appointments as President of Takuya Hirano at Microsoft Japan, Tatsuo Yasunaga at Mitsui & Co, Koji Arima at Denso, Tatsuya Tanaka at Fujitsu and Takahiro Hachigo at Honda have all been described as plucking burdock roots, as they are in their 40s or 50s, younger than normal for Presidents in corporate Japan.  The average age of Japanese Presidents was 62 in 2014 (up from 61 in 2013), around 10 years higher than the global average.

The older age is of course partly explained by the continuation of seniority based pay and promotion in Japan – although Panasonic, Sony and Hitachi have all recently announced they are abolishing or looking to abolish this system.

The average age in Japan for a “kacho” (section head, the first managerial position in Japanese companies) is 38.6 and 44 for a “bucho” (department head, or General Manager) according to Recruitworks.  In India, China or Thailand, the average is 9 years lower for kacho and 10 years lower for bucho.  Even the US average is 5 years lower for both positions.

Kotosaka asserts that Japanese companies need to start pulling out younger burdock roots, people who might be future executives, and making sure they have early leadership experience.  If this does not happen, the younger generations of Japanese will soon feel a big gap with their overseas peers.

Already Kotosaka has heard (as I have) from Japanese companies that they feel the utilisation of non-Japanese or external executives has increased and the presence of Japanese executives has faded.

The most notable example is of course Christophe Weber, President of Takeda Pharma, and his team of 16 executives, of whom 8 are non-Japanese and have come from outside the company and two are non-Japanese who joined through being executives in a Takeda acquisition.  Weber had his first leadership experience at the age of 29 when he became a country manager at GSK.  Carlos Ghosn of Nissan also became head of a factory at the age of 27.

My former employer Mitsubishi Corporation is mentioned as an honourable exception to the lack of experience given to juniors, along with gaishi (foreign owned) consulting companies and private equity firms.  For such companies, people are the main asset, and it’s true I suppose that trading companies such as Mitsubishi that have now moved more towards acquisitions rather than trading, do afford ample opportunity for younger Japanese to take up management positions abroad.  In practice though, I have seen many instances where the acquisition is left to manage itself, and the Japanese expat director mostly stays in the regional headquarters, processing paperwork to send back to Japan HQ, rather than hands on managing the business.

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Overseas experience and Japan’s elite, past and present

When I started working at Mitsubishi Corporation in London, I was intrigued by the fact that Mitsubishi had first opened the office there as early as 1915. Most British people, if they have thought about it at all, would assume Japanese companies did not establish themselves in the UK until well after World War Two.  In fact it turned out Mitsubishi Corporation was a relative late comer to London amongst the sogo shosha (Japanese trading companies), although the Iwasaki founding family had links with the UK from long before 1915.

I was reminded of these links thanks to a recent talk by Dr Ohnuma Shinichi, professor of Experimental Ophthalmology at University College London (UCL) to Japanese business people in London, where he showed slide after slide of the names of the Japanese future elite who studied at UCL in the Meiji era, starting with the 14 students from the Satsuma clan in 1865, through to Iwasaki Toshiya, who studied Chemistry at UCL in 1901.

Dr Ohnuma was showing us these slides to remind us of how the founders of the modern Japanese state and business had fearlessly travelled and lived abroad, and there was a keen discussion afterwards as to how this spirit of adventure could be revived amongst young Japanese people now.

One of Dr Ohnuma’s suggestions was that Japanese companies should demonstrate that there is a positive advantage to have worked abroad, and to ensure there are proper roles for their employees with overseas experience to fulfil when they return.

At Mitsubishi Corporation it was an unwritten rule that top executives have overseas experience, and as a consequence, most new graduates join Mitsubishi Corporation and other trading companies in the expectation that they will be posted abroad.  I realise however, that for other major Japanese companies, whose origins are more domestically oriented, it would be rather hard to implement this rule straight away, when in most cases hardly any of their current executives have overseas experience.

Smaller companies may have more scope to put such criteria in place however.  The leaders of such companies can set the tone themselves, just as Sony’s Morita Akio did in 1963, when he controversially relocated himself and his family to New York, in order to understand the US market better.

It is surely no coincidence that the current President of Sony, Hirai Kazuo, lived abroad as a child and worked for Sony overseas.  Despite Naruke Makoto (ex President of Microsoft Japan)’s assertion that nobody has ever succeeded who went to international school, Hirai did indeed go to the American School in Tokyo.

Sony may be having its problems right now, but I truly hope it succeeds in its revival plans, and proves that the spirit of entrepreneurism, openness to the world outside Japan and adaptability to change of its founder can live on, if the founder himself has set the tone correctly by his own actions.

(This article was originally published in Japanese, for 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.)

My book on the history of Mitsubishi Corporation in London since 1915 is now available in digital Kindle format (link to amazon.co.uk)

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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To be a rich company director in Japan, be foreign or the founder

The cover story for the Nikkei Business magazine last month was on Japanese corporate governance, specifically focusing on what makes for effective use of outside directors (and citing Sony as a case of ineffective use of outside directors).

One of Japanese prime minister Abe’s policies for strengthening Japanese corporate governance has been to introduce a comply-or-explain regulation for any company listed on the Japanese stock markets with less than one outside director on its board.  The Nikkei notes that in other countries such as the USA, UK, France and Germany, regulations are stricter, requiring comply-or-explain for boards with less than half the directors as outside directors, in most cases.

Some other statistics caught my eye:

  • Outside directors of listed Japanese companies who have board level experience elsewhere – 38.1%
  • Average time served as director – 4 years
  • Average salary – Y12m (not much more than US$100K)
  • Female directors are 6.5% (159 directors) of the total
  • Foreign directors are 2.9% (70 directors) of the total
  • They spend around 10-11 hours a month on their directorial duties

Best paid directors overall for Japanese listed companies:

  1. Carlos Ghosn – Nissan (US$9m)
  2. Frank Morich – Takeda Pharma (until April 1 2014) (US$9m)
  3. Kohji Tanabe founder of U-Shin (automotive and industrial equipment) (US$7.6m)
  4. Kazuo Okada founder of  Universal Entertainment (Pachinko) (US$7.4)
  5. Tadataka Yamada – Takeda Pharma (US$7.4m)

Other foreigners in the top 30 include Timothy Andree at Dentsu (advertising agency), Roger Barnett at Shaklee (nutritional supplements company which was majority owned by Japanese pharmaco Yamanouchi and is still listed on JASDAQ), Carsten Fischer at Shiseido and Ronald Fisher at Softbank.

Companies with the most directors earning over Y100m (US$900K) were

  1. Mitsubishi Electric (18)
  2. Canon (12)
  3. FANUC (automation products) (10)
  4. Mitsubishi Corporation (8)
  5. Mitsui & Co (8)
  6. Nomura (7)
  7. Toyota (7)
  8. Daiwa Securities (6)
  9. Itochu (6)
  10. Nissan (5)

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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Japan’s M&A boom – a way of forcing globalization?

I was reading the last chapter of a book (The 1990s and beyond (pdf)) I wrote which was published in 2000 about the history of Mitsubishi Corporation in London, and was reminded that I had come up with a concept of “forced globalization” to describe what Japanese companies might need to do to truly globalize, based on their experiences up to the 1990s.  Much of what I said still holds true, but what I had not anticipated was the surge in cross border acquisitions by Japanese companies as another route into globalization these past ten years.

My view then was that Japanese companies will not “naturally” globalize, in a business-led pursuit of profitable growth, because of the “representing Japan” mindset of companies such as Mitsubishi Corporation, and the fact that so much knowledge creation and business creation is in Japanese and the Japanese staff feel most comfortable with keeping it that way.

I proposed that human resource-led “forced” globalization – starting with globalizing the management, might be the only way to break the mould.The graphic I produced to illustrate this is not in the pdf, so I have reproduced it here:

“Natural” globalization:

'Natural' Globalization

“Forced” globalization:

forced globalization

 

 

 

 

I was imagining Japanese companies would continue doing what we attempted at Mitsubishi Corporation in the 1990s, which was to hire and develop more non-Japanese people, in the hope that they would then create more global business.  This strategy still continues for many Japanese companies, but as I predicted, takes time, and often the non-Japanese employees quit before it bears fruit, through frustration.

Acquiring an overseas company is an instant way to globalize the business, and in theory should instantly globalize the management.  But as described in previous posts, often the overseas managers are kept at an arm’s length.

The bottom line from all of this, which has not changed at all in the past decades, is that Japanese companies will only do what the Japanese employees of that company see the need to do.  The majority of Japanese employees are not likely to want to become global themselves – it is too far out of their comfort zone.  Nor do they want to bring non-Japanese into their circles as this would be a threat to their own careers and status in the company.  Nor do they want to be actively involved in the management of the overseas subsidiaries – the risks of being associated with any failure are too great.

The constructive message of this, however, is it is therefore up to the employees and management of the acquired company to take the initiative and ask to integrate with the Japan parent – just as the Brazilian employees and managers at Schincariol asked Kirin to change the company name to Brazil Kirin.  Japanese executives are familiar and happy with complying with requests that come from “bottom up” and represent the consensus views of a group of employees.

If you are being acquired by a Japanese company, you may be interested in Japan Intercultural Consulting’s (represented by Rudlin Consulting in EMEA) post merger integration services.

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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Useful to have around, but not really one of us

I’ve been meaning to post about the appointment of Mitsuru Chino as the first female to take an executive position at a major Japanese trading house for a while now, and International Women’s Day seems like a good moment to do this.  Is this the harbinger of change in Japan though?

I get weary of being asked by people in Western companies whether Japanese companies or businessmen aren’t sexist and do we therefore need to appoint men as the customer liaison.  Most memorably, this was asked of me by a bunch of German men (no women) at a leading car parts company – who then proceeded to spend most of their spare time on the course I was facilitating in Japan working out which girlie bar they should visit next.  I so wanted to turn the mirror on them and say “physician heal thyself”.

But my own country (the UK) is even worse than Germany in terms of women in senior positions,  according to this survey I saw in the Financial Times today.  Japan is right at the bottom of the ranking of 20 countries, below the UAE.  So, even with the appointment of Chino, Japan has a long way to go to catch up.

Chino has a very impressive CV – a graduate of Cornell Law School, a semi professional classical singer and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.  She was born in the Netherlands and lived in the UK and the USA as a child. I saw the same pattern amongst the highly impressive women who joined Mitsubishi Corporation when I worked there in Japan – one woman was a scratch golfer, fluent English and Mandarin Chinese speaker.  She left a while ago however, to join a start up.  Chino only joined Itochu in 2000, so was a mid term career hire.

What we are seeing both in Japan and elsewhere, it seems to me, is that women are given senior positions because of their specialist knowledge, and to add a touch of diversity, not just in terms of being female, but because they have a non traditional career path.  However I get the sense that this means we are “useful to have around, but no need to take too seriously” when it comes to dishing out the senior executive, general management roles, which continue to be the preserve of men with one track CVs.  The question that we women ask ourselves is, do we want those jobs anyway?

Later addition:

A couple more senior female appointments have been announced – at JAL (ex cabin attendant who turned around customer satisfaction issues and controlled costs) and TEPCO (she was the person in charge of damages compensation for victims of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster ).  Those useful women again – do the people facing dirty work the men don’t want to do.

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Japanese Industrial Policy redux

I expect we’re going to see a lot more of these kind of announcements under the new Abe government: “Japan To Push Low-Cost Satellite Launches“($) (I bet this was a civil service/private sector plan put on the back burner under the DPJ, who did not like funding these kinds of big technology plans) and “Government Eyes Public Funds to Aid Manufacturing“($) (government plans to buy and lease back old plant to Japanese companies, so they can invest the money freed up in R&D or capital equipment – not exactly a market centric solution.)

My old mentor, Yorihiko Kojima, (now chairman of Mitsubishi Corporation)’s name keeps cropping up too.  He’s in the frame for the Japanese Chamber of Commerce top job apparently, and (as  detailed in a more than usually revealing article from the Nikkei) is part of the Sakura-kai, of top executives from Fujifilm, Mitsubishi Heavy, JR, Hitachi etc that had met with Abe or his advisors at least three times last year.  Under the previous Abe government, there was a predecessor group,’Kisetsu no kai’ mainly of people who had been at Tokyo University together, including former LDP politician  Kaoru Yosano.  And I well remember from  my Mitsubishi days that Abe’s older brother sat just around the corner on my floor in the Tokyo HQ, running the beer team I think.

It’s easy to see this as  reactionary old cronies getting together, reforming the Iron Triangle, I suppose, but if Kojima-san himself is anything to go by, there could well be some progressive influences coming to the fore too.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the announcements about getting more women into government and the LDP leadership didn’t have some private sector urging behind it from people like Kojima-san, and I wonder if there might be some more progressive, immigration and globalization friendly policies being tested out soon too.

 

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Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2021-10-12.

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