The ultimate quality can not beat the price performance.
Wen 丨 Hua Shang Tao Strategy Zhou Ruihua
The plate is brushed seven times, the toilet water can be drunk, and the bowl of rice is cooked for a lifetime...
Tampering with quality inspection reports, professional fraud for decades...
Which is the truth about Japanese manufacturing?
【01】
In May 2021, some high-speed railways in England, England, were found to have cracks in the bottom of the carriage, and some cracks were even as long as 28.5 centimeters. This discovery led to a widespread suspension of high-speed rail operations in the region.
These problem cars, which have been in service for only three years, are "Hitachi 800" trains produced by Hitachi Corporation of Japan.
After five months of investigation, Hitachi admitted that the reason for the cracks in the carriage was quality inspection fraud, including direct tampering with inspection results, changing inspection conditions, or not following customer regulations. Moreover, Hitachi counterfeiting is not a day or two, but "at least 30 years."
Hitachi counterfeiting, which has a history of more than 110 years and symbolizes Japan's industrial strength, is just the tip of the iceberg of Japanese manufacturing fraud.
In recent years, many of Japan's leading manufacturing companies have been caught up in counterfeiting scandals, and the time span of counterfeiting is often several decades:
Takata, Japan, is the world's second-largest producer of automotive airbags, after Sweden's Autoliv. But it is such a company that has been tampering with the key detection data of the product for more than a decade, resulting in more than 20 deaths and more than 200 injuries, which can be called the "Chernobyl incident" in the automotive industry. In 2017, Takata Company filed for bankruptcy due to the "air bag gate" incident;
Kobe Steel Co., Ltd., one of the world's top 500 companies and Japan's third-largest steel company, admitted in 2017 that it tampered with the inspection data of some steel and aluminum products and sold them to more than 500 customers such as Boeing and GM in shoddy charging. The history of Kobe steel counterfeiting even dates back to the 1990s;
Japanese industrial giant Mitsubishi Electric, whose air conditioners, displays and other railway vehicle electrical products account for 60% of the market share in Japan, in 2021 broke out its railway vehicle air conditioning inspection fraud, the history of counterfeiting for 35 years, the president resigned;
As early as 2017, Mitsubishi General Materials, another company under the Mitsubishi Group, also admitted that the subsidiary tampered with some product data, and 258 companies were affected;
……
In recent years, japanese companies have not been completely counted for fraud
What is even more exaggerated is that former employees of Kobe Steel broke the news that since the 1990s, a fraud memorandum has been circulating between various departments of the company, instructing employees on how to counterfeit without being detected by customers.
Counterfeiting by well-known Japanese companies has become a phenomenon. From the perspective of time span, it is difficult to believe that it is an individual or a certain link of fraud, but a top-down, systematic fraud.
A few years ago, the scene of Chinese people sweeping goods in Japan is still vivid, "Made in Japan" is equivalent to high quality, but now how has it become the hardest hit area of counterfeiting?
【02】
In 2018, Japanese bearing manufacturer Tsubaki Nakajima admitted that between 2016 and 2018, the company imported steel balls from Luoyang Bearings in China, labeled them with the Tsubaki Nakajima Katsugi factory and exported them to Europe and the United States.
After the counterfeiting was exposed, Tsubaki Nakajima admitted that because the product output could not meet the market, the purchase price was lower, but the quality fully met the customer's requirements of the Chinese steel balls, disguised as Tsubaki Nakajima products for sale.
Tsubaki Nakajima is the world's benchmark bearing steel ball enterprise, representing the world's highest bearing steel ball manufacturing process, and has become the world's leader in bearing steel balls after acquiring Grace of the United States in 2018.
Tsubaki Nakajima's counterfeiting exposed the dilemma faced by Japanese manufacturing companies in the process of globalization: in the face of the rise of Manufacturing in China and South Korea, Japanese manufacturing companies are facing severe competitive pressure, which is not from technology, but from efficiency.
Kobayashi Kenye is an extreme example.
Kenji Kobayashi is a hidden champion in polishing technology. The company, which has only five craftsmen, has milled 2.5 million mirror-like iPods in four years.
But after the iPod sales doubled, Kobayashi's lack of production capacity was exposed, and Apple moved orders to China. Kobayashi Kenye can only accept some difficult, small batches of orders, direct loss of 70 million to 80 million yen.
In the face of China's polishing production line, Kazuo Kobayashi, president of Kobayashi Research, sighed: "Even if four or five of us work hard, we have no chance of winning." ”
From Tsubaki Nakajima to Kobayashi Kenyo, the dilemma of these companies is that they have technological advantages, but they have not formed market efficiency advantages.
Japanese semiconductor expert Takashi Yugami mentioned in his "Lost Manufacturing: The Defeat of Japanese Manufacturing" that the Japanese manufacturing industry often falls into the ultimate pursuit of technological perfection, investing 80%-90% of its energy, only in exchange for only 10%-20% performance improvement. This is an "innovation trap" that ignores not only the input-output ratio, but also the real needs of the market.
The decline of Japanese semiconductors is falling into this "trap".
In the 1980s, Japan's DRAM (dynamic random memory) chips once beat down American chip companies and occupied an absolute dominant position in the international chip market.
But after entering the 1990s, the personal computer came out, and the demand for chips in the mass consumer market soared. American chip companies are eyeing the opportunity to transform to the mass consumer market, developing chips for the mass consumer market, and South Korea and Taiwan have also taken advantage of cheap labor to achieve "curve overtaking".
However, Japanese chip companies are still striving for DRAM excellence, developing DRAM chips with a service life of up to 25 years, but they have lost the market and have been replaced by South Korea.
The chip is just a microcosm of Made in Japan. With the catch-up of the manufacturing industry in China and South Korea, with the advantages of production factors such as labor and land, market efficiency advantages have been formed, which has brought pressure to Japanese manufacturing companies.
Kobe Steel, which has been counterfeiting for more than 30 years, from 2011 to 2017, the operating income has always hovered between 1.6 trillion yen and 1.9 trillion yen;
In the field of bearing steel balls, Continental Lixing Shares, before the merger of Tsubaki Island and the United States Enen, formed a three-legged trend with them and entered the global procurement system of bearing giants SKF and Schaeffler.
Through comparison, it will be found that the time of counterfeiting by Japanese companies and the "lost 30 years" of the Japanese economy are highly overlapping in time. Since the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble, most companies have faced profit pressure, lack of motivation to increase investment in research and development and innovation, and industrial upgrading and upgrading. In the micro aspect, it will inevitably be reflected in the reduction of enterprise efficiency and the decline of competitiveness.
In this case, under the pressure of profitability, if you do not want to repeat the fate of Kobayashi Kenyo, counterfeiting has become a means for Japanese manufacturing companies to maintain competitiveness.
【03】
Is Japanese manufacturing in decline?
The frequent exposure of The Japanese manufacturing fraud scandal, as well as japan's home appliances and digital cameras have withdrawn from the consumer market, has led to the continuous decline of Japanese manufacturing.
Is this really the case? To answer this question, we must first know, what is the strong core of Japanese manufacturing?
On the Shinkansen, Japan's high-speed railway, there is a "nut that never loosens", which comes from Hard Lock Co., Ltd., a small company with only 45 employees.
Many years ago, Hardlock sent the drawings of the nut to the company's official website, with a detailed description of the nut principle structure.
Has anyone imitated success? No.
The reason is that the company's years-old accumulation of technology and the superb skills of craftsmen cannot be imitated and copied.
A product contains two kinds of technology, tangible and intangible, size, parameters, production process, appearance of these tangible parts, can be easily imitated, and the intangible technology, technology and experience accumulated by enterprises and craftsmen year after year, which is the essence of Japanese manufacturing.
The genes of Japanese manufacturing, on the one hand, determine that Japanese companies are small and sophisticated, and the more sophisticated the products, the more difficult it is to achieve large-scale mass production.
According to Japan's "White Paper on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises", among the 3.6 million japanese companies, only 11,000 are large enterprises and 3.58 million are small and medium-sized enterprises, accounting for 99.7% of the total number of Japanese enterprises.
Some of Japan's "hidden champions," such as the aforementioned Kobayashi Kenye and Hardlock, and kitajima Stranding, known for its "spinning" metal plate forming process, have only a few dozen workers.
On the other hand, in order to maintain competitiveness, Japanese companies are bound to develop in the direction of high precision.
When the electronic products of Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic and Sharp disappeared in the mass consumer market, and the traditional manufacturing giant market was cannibalized by China and South Korea, Japanese companies have controlled the core links of technology-intensive and high value-added in semiconductors, precision instruments, medicines, new materials and other segments, forming an irreplaceable advantage.
In deloitte's Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index report, Japan's manufacturing ranking has experienced a "V" reversal from sixth to tenth, and from tenth to fourth, reflecting that Japan's manufacturing industry has restructured its competitiveness in new areas after experiencing the pain of transformation.
For example, in the field of materials, Japan's Toray carbon fiber is the world's carbon fiber boss, and in the field of photoresist, the core material of the semiconductor process, only Japan's JSR, Fuji Electronic Materials, Tokyo Yinghua, Japan's Shin-etsu and other companies occupy 72% of the global market.
These new materials industry barriers are high, low replaceability, without these materials, semiconductor chips, aviation rockets are "stuck neck".
Another example is precision machine tools, the world's top ten machine tool manufacturers, Japan accounts for four, and there is a Japanese-German joint venture. It can be said that Japan occupies half of the world's machine tools.
Some enterprises have withdrawn from the mass consumer market and gone upstream of the industrial chain, becoming irreplaceable overlords in the subdivision to B business.
Sony once led the trend of Japanese electronics, and the Walkman of the year almost created a new casual lifestyle, and its popularity among young people was not inferior to that of later iPhones. But now in the electronics market, Sony has almost disappeared, leaving only the back of a "declining aristocrat".
But "decline" is a great misunderstanding of Sony.
In fiscal 2019, Sony's sales revenue was 8,259.9 billion yen (about 458.2 billion yuan) and operating profit was 845.5 billion yen (about 46.9 billion yuan). The largest increase was in its Imaging & Sensing Solutions business, where sales revenue increased 22% year-on-year and operating profit reached 235.6 billion yen (13 billion yuan).
The decade of Sony's consumer market decline is the decade it dominated the CMOS image sensing space.
Over the past decade, Sony has taken advantage of its camera business in lens imaging to secure its position as the leader in the CMOS space: in 2018, Sony accounted for half of the global CMOS market with a market share of 49.9%.
CMOS image sensor market share in 2018
Over the past decade, Japan's nominal GDP has maintained a low growth rate of about 2%, but the overall profitability of Japan's manufacturing industry has increased.
In 2017, the average profit margin of Large Japanese manufacturing companies exceeded 8%, and behind the high profit margin is the high technical barriers and strong bargaining power of The Japanese manufacturing industry.
Japan's manufacturing industry is strong, strong in invisible craftsmanship, which is also the most important part of the manufacturing chain to determine the height of quality.
In 2015, the Forbidden City was suspended from a century-old overhaul because of the retirement of craftsmen. After learning of this news, Guangming Daily commented:
The craftsman will not exist, the skill will be safe.
This is also a true portrayal of China's manufacturing industry. All along, China is a manufacturing power, but not a manufacturing power, between the manufacturing power and the manufacturing power, what is missing is the "craftsmanship".
At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, under the condition of backward basic scientific research and process technology, mainland industrial workers relied on manual technology to make up for the lack of production processes in integrated circuits, lathes and other industries, and create industrial miracles.
But craftsmen have become scarce in this era.
From a manufacturing power to a manufacturing power, it is not only necessary to have "craftsman skills", but also "craftsmen can survive, skills can be passed on", cultivate craftsmen in big countries, and realize intergenerational inheritance in order to make up for the "last kilometer" of China's manufacturing chain.
【References】
[1] Lost Manufacturing: The Defeat of Japanese Manufacturing, Takashi Yukami, Machinery Industry Press
[2] "The Revelation of the Rise and Fall of Japanese Manufacturing Industry" Ordinary People Talk Finance ordinary people
[3] "Is Japanese Manufacturing Really In Decline?" Whetstone
[4] "Experts Interpret the Causes and Effects of the "Made in Japan" Counterfeiting Incident", China Quality News Xu Jianhua
[5] "The Hidden Transformation of Japanese Companies (Part 1): Seeking Opportunities in Danger, Sneaking Forward", Sasuke Consultant
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