Suntory

Mitsubishi Corp alumnus toasts the Suntory spirit

When I left Mitsubishi Corporation after 9 years, I felt guilty that I had not found a way to repay (in business development rather than money) the MBA they sponsored me through and worried that the wonderful sempai (mentors) who had supported my career would now be angry with me. I was delighted and relieved therefore, when one of the sempai, very senior in the company, invited me for a drink when I was in Japan on a business trip, and explained to me and the other team members at the table that Mitsubishi Corporation should regard people who leave as alumni, just as McKinsey do. “We may end up doing business together one day,” he predicted.

Indeed Mitsubishi Corporation is now a valued customer of mine, and I have seen many other MC alumni rise to some of the top positions in the Japanese business world. Probably the most well known one is Takeshi Niinami. A graduate of Keio University, as so many MC people are, he was sponsored by MC through a Harvard MBA. He eventually became President of Lawson, the convenience store chain that MC had invested in, leading its turn around.

He is now the President of Suntory Holdings and was interviewed in Nikkei Business magazine about recent developments there, including the acquisition of Beam Inc (but not its acquisitions in Europe of Lucozade, Ribena and Orangina) and the “Suntory Way”.

What Beam got from Suntory

“The Suntory Way means that we develop products that our competitors do not have”, says Niinami. “When I explained this to the Jim Beam factory in Kentucky they were very supportive. Beam Inc headquarters people all had MBAs. American marketers get a sense of consumer trends from consultant’s reports and decided their strategy based on that, they never went to the gemba (shopfloor) the way we do in Japan. They just told the Kentucky factory what to do, top down, from afar. If you told them to go to the gemba they’d probably quit. There wasn’t one single person in the executive team who came from manufacturing and they weren’t investing in the factory. But the Kentucky people loved making things. So when we told them we saw manufacturing as the most important thing and appointed someone from manufacturing to the board, their motivation shot up.”

“When they came to see our factories in Japan, they became aware of the need to improve their Kentucky factory. Beam is even older than Suntory – more than 200 years of history. We were able to revive their DNA.”

What Suntory learnt from Beam

“Beam are really good at managing profitability. Suntory got heavily into debt to buy Beam and we are all focused on reducing this debt. Suntory was not as good at managing cash flow as Beam but we have learnt.”

What’s next for Suntory and Niinami

Niinami was brought in by the previous President and now CEO and Chairman, Nobutada Saji (also from the founding family) in 2014. Niinami thinks his successor is likely to be another member of the founding family – current COO NobuhiroTorii – and seems in favour of this, as a way of maintaining Suntory’s spirit. He also expects Suntory to remain a privately held company, despite discussions to the contrary when he first became President. The advantage, he says, is that Suntory is able to contribute to society, through the Suntory Hall (a famous concert venue in Tokyo) and also a water sustainability initiative, without having to justify this to shareholders.

As an outsider, Niinami feels he was able to see objectively how good the Suntory spirit was, and how to roll it out globally. He has set up a Suntory University to help with this. Although Niinami is only 59, he says he is willing to finish his career at Suntory. “I am already “of age” and I don’t think anyone will be asking this “odd fish” to join them.”

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The Suntory revolutionary from Mitsubishi Corporation

Takeshi Niinami is probably the most famous alumnus of my alma mater, Mitsubishi Corporation. Born in 1959 and a graduate of Keio (as so many Mitsubishi ‘gentlemen’ are), he started off in sugar trading and after a Mitsubishi Corp sponsored MBA at Harvard, he was involved with the foundation of the Sodexo joint venture in Japan with MC, and then transferred to and ultimately ran the convenience store chain Lawson, which MC had acquired a majority share in.

He was lured to the family run Suntory in 2014 by the grandson of the founder, Nobutada Saji, and has been shaking the place up ever since, much to the consternation of many employees. The revolution was already underway, as Suntory had already announced its $16bn acquisition of US whisky maker Beam and the year before had acquired the UK brands Lucozade and Ribena from GlaxoSmithKline for $1.35bn and in 2009 acquired Orangina Schweppes for $1.97bn.

A former director who worked with him at Lawsons says “there are people who cannot keep up with him. He keeps coming up with new things, and then says do it within a year”. Niinami believes that Suntory will not be able to function well as a global company if it only promotes from within, so has appointed Vincent Ambrosino, formerly CFO of Pepsico Canada as an Executive Officer of Suntory Holdings, in charge of strategy, finance and accounting. He only joined Beam in 2013 as the CFO so this by Japanese standards was seen as meteoric rise to a top position.

Furthermore, Makiko Ono, one of the rare senior Japanese businesswomen in a major company, who had been involved with various collaborations with foreign companies as executive officer of Suntory Food & Beverages, has transferred to Suntory Holdings, to become the GM of global HR. Around 17 people from Suntory Holdings will be seconded to Beam Suntory, with the aim of improving global mobility. Niinami himself announced that he wants to hire more people from outside the company, “including those who have investment experience who were in trading companies” – hiring in his own image, in other words.

Suntory Holdings mid term plan has highly ambitious double digit targets for turnover and profit. It is unlikely this will be reached organically, says Toyo Keizai magazine. More M&A can be expected. Niinami is not likely to slow down.

Fewer women on the boards of Japanese companies in Europe than in Japan

We’ve revised our Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe again. Where possible we have updated the number of employees, which means the Suntory Group is now in the Top 30 along with Konica Minolta (and Kao and Daiichi Sankyo are out). This time we wanted to take a look at the gender and nationality diversity on boards, both in Japan and Europe, and have discovered that there are actually fewer women on the boards of Japanese companies in Europe than in Japan.

Only two out of 19 (10%) of European headquarter boards of Japanese companies have women on them – Astellas and Suntory (the latter including Makiko Ono, an executive in Suntory Japan) and only 3 of the 14 (21%) UK based Japanese companies we looked at (in cases where the European HQ was not in the UK or there were separate European and UK companies in the UK) had women members – Lucite (subsidiary of Mitsubishi Chemical Holding/Mitsubishi Rayon), Komatsu and NTT Data. Komatsu UK’s female director is Keiko Fujiwara, who is the CEO of Komatsu Europe, in Belgium. This contrasts with 13 (43%) out of the Top 30 companies’ boards in Japan having women directors. In case you were wondering, only 6% of FTSE250 companies have no women on them.

4% of the Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe’s board members in Europe and/or the UK are female
6% of the Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe’s board members in Japan are female
8% of the Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe’s board members in Japan are non-Japanese
16% of the board members of the Top 100 listed Japanese companies in Japan are female
19.6% of FTSE250 board members are female

Around 62% of the members of European and UK boards of of the Top 30 Japanese companies are European, on average. Companies whose boards in the UK and Europe only had Japanese directors were Toshiba, Fast Retailing (Uniqlo), Fujifilm and Sharp. Sharp and Toshiba’s troubles are well known. Fast Retailing recently reported struggles in the US market and falling profits in Europe for Uniqlo, Comptoir des Cotonniers and Princess Tam Tam. Fujifilm has made a remarkable transformation from a B2C camera film to a B2B imaging company but the last set of quarterly results, issued last month were deemed “mixed”.

(Note: only main boards, not executive or supervisory boards were analysed, and company secretaries were excluded)

The full chart is here (highlighted means “above average) and can be downloaded here :Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe board diversity Nov 3 2015

Successes of Japanese cross border M&A #5 – Kirin

Given the headline grabbing news of Suntory acquiring Beam Inc for $16bn today, the second case study on Kirin in the final part of the Nikkei Business’s recent series on Japanese cross border acquisitions will have been read closely by Suntory executives. Suntory through the acquisition has become the third biggest drinks maker in the world, having already acquired Lucozade and Ribena from GSK in and Orangina Schweppes in 2009.

There were talks between Kirin and Suntory in 2010 regarding a possible merger which failed due to an inability to agree on the management and ownership of the merged organisation – Suntory is privately held, and still family run, whereas Kirin is a publicly listed company, belonging to the Mitsubishi group of companies.

Kirin had also been acquiring companies since 2007 when it bought the Australian dairy and beverage company National Foods which then acquired Dairy Farmers. Kirin then aquired Lion Nathan, a major Australian brewers, and formed Lion Nathan National Foods in 2009.

Kirin’s concern was that in a consumer facing industry, simply despatching executives from Japan to run the business would result in marketing and product development that does not suit the local market, so they have delegated a fair amount of authority to the local executives. It was a process of trial and error since 2010, with the acquisition of Brazil’s Schincariol (the second largest Brazilian brewery and beverage company after AmBev) in 2011 proving a turning point.

Kirin promoted the Brazilian COO to CEO with the new board having 3 Japanese and 4 Brazilian members. Schincariol was also still an owner-run company, with each factory managing its own purchasing and warehousing. Kirin could have intervened to standardize but was concerned that they may have made mistakes without local knowledge. So whilst major investments and disposals had to be approved by Japan headquarters, operational decisions were left to the local executives.

Schincariol managed to make Y3bn cost savings by 2012 and doubled their operating profit. At the request of the local staff, they changed the name to Brazil Kirin in November 2012.

Nikkei Business comments “it seems that learning from the company you acquire brings results.”

Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2022-12-09.

Tag: Suntory

Mitsubishi Corp alumnus toasts the Suntory spirit

The Suntory revolutionary from Mitsubishi Corporation

Fewer women on the boards of Japanese companies in Europe than in Japan

Successes of Japanese cross border M&A #5 – Kirin

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