Frequent counterfeiting Japan's auto industry is in jeopardy?

114000 items of fraud data, affecting more than 10 car companies, a time span of 20 years. A brake company, so that Japanese manufacturing once again dusty.

This is not the first counterfeiting case in the Japanese automobile industry-- Nissan counterfeiting, Mitsubishi counterfeiting, Kobe steel counterfeiting, Japanese Toray counterfeiting, and Takata sha airbag. The gold-lettered signboard of Made in Japan, is collapsing. Is Japan's automobile industry in danger?

What happened to "made in Japan"?

For a long time, made in Japan has been known as "craftsman spirit". In response to successive incidents of counterfeiting, a Japanese craftsman in his 70s responded, "I really hope that the reputation made in Japan that our generation has worked hard for decades can be maintained."

Over the past six years, the Japanese automobile manufacturing industry has constantly refreshed consumer awareness with the frequency of a major case almost every year. From complete vehicles to spare parts, and even upstream raw materials, counterfeiting incidents emerge one after another.

Most of this series of scandals are not controlled by individuals, but are systematic from top to bottom. Nissan detection fraud incidents, usually use unqualified inspectors to participate in the vehicle factory inspection, officially meet the inspection will be replaced with qualified quality inspectors, almost become an internal hidden rule.

The same is true of Kobe steel counterfeiting, due to the urgent delivery time, in order to catch up with the schedule of production, at the cost of counterfeiting. "as long as we examine it carefully, almost all of them are wrong, but the delivery is urgent, so we have to turn a blind eye." An employee involved in the review revealed.

It is shocking that the time span of counterfeiting is so long. Dawning brake 114000 items of quality inspection data are tampered with or fabricated, accounting for nearly 60% of the total data. Counterfeiting can be traced back to 2001, with a time span of 20 years. The Takata sha airbag incident showed signs at the end of 1990s; Kobe steel counterfeiting for at least 10 years; Mitsubishi material data fraud 20 years ago; Toray tire tampering with reinforcement and cord quality data for 8 years.

These counterfeiters don't seem to feel guilty yet. About 5000 of the products supplied by dawning brakes failed quality standards, but they believed that "faulty parts do not cause safety problems." The president of Toray Co., Ltd. gave an even more impolite answer. Had it not been for the pressure of the Kobe steel data fraud incident, they did not intend to disclose the truth of the fraud.

Today, Japanese counterfeiting is no longer the "exclusive" of the automobile industry.

Construction industry: Asahi Kasei Building Materials Co., Ltd. tampered with basic data before construction, resulting in the tilt of Japanese buildings, which is a very rare event in Japanese history.

Pharmaceutical industry: Kobayashi Chemical has admitted wrongdoing that a major ingredient that should have been added to oral antifungal drugs for tinea pedis has been replaced with sleep inducers, endangering the health of users.

Nuclear power field: Fukushima nuclear power plant, extended service and tampered with safety records, resulting in a major safety accident.

Home appliance industry: Toshiba has suffered heavy losses and has falsified its financial data for years; Sony is suspected of falsifying its financial statements and sales data.

Does it become a habit of an industry to fake, apologize and recreate the vicious circle of counterfeiting?

Why did you fall from the top?

Japanese industry, which developed from the ruins of World War II, has come a long way. After the war, they used their creative skills to improve the lives of their own people, and won world recognition with a steady pace of development.

Takashi Tang, director of the Japan Precision processing Research Institute, is also the author of "lost Manufacturing: the defeat of Japanese Manufacturing." He summed up the common characteristics of Japan's successful industries: a manufacturing industry with high technology integration and high demand continuity as the core.

In other words, Japan's strengths are those industries that need to combine multiple components or technologies together, that is, comprehensive integration, and improve production efficiency through total quality management in order to become competitive.

The Japanese automobile manufacturing industry fully meets the above standards. Some people even commented that the development history of Japanese automobile manufacturing is the growth history of Japanese industrial manufacturing.

In the 1980s, Japan's economy entered its heyday, and Japan's automobile manufacturing industry also reached an unprecedented high level. In 1990, Japan produced 13.49 million cars, a record high in its own history.

"there must be a road to the front of the mountain, and there must be a Toyota where there is a road." this slogan, which originated in the 1980s, is still talked about by people today.

However, things will turn back at the extreme, and after the peak, the "made in Japan myth" is gradually disenchanted, showing signs of decline. According to IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook data, the world ranking of Japanese manufacturing industry has gradually declined from No. 1 in the early 1980s to more than 20 in 1990 and 25th in 2018.

According to the statistics of the Fortune 500 manufacturing industry, the number of Japanese enterprises on the list decreased from 99 in 1996 to 70 after 2006, only 52 after 2016, and continued to decline to about 27 in 2019. In particular, the international competitiveness of Japan's electrical and machinery industry has declined significantly.

Now, what is the attribution behind the gradual collapse of Japanese automakers? Environment, talent, management and culture all have an impact.

In the era of information, networking and digitization, the competitive environment of manufacturing enterprises has changed greatly, and the business model that used to rely on industrial agglomeration and technology accumulation and development also needs to change, which also means that Japan is proud of "excellence" and "on-site work efficiency". It is difficult to continue to give full play to its advantages. This makes it difficult for many Japanese manufacturing companies to adapt.

The shortage of talent is also a dilemma for Japanese manufacturing. The most intuitive reason behind Nissan's test fraud is a shortage of manpower. According to a survey conducted by the Japanese Imperial Database, labor shortage has become a major factor affecting the development of Japanese enterprises, of which 65.7% are labor shortage enterprises in the vehicle and parts retail industry.

The traditional business model of Japanese manufacturing enterprises has also become a constraint. Japan has been lack of innovative market environment, at the same time, within Japanese companies, there is also a lack of fast and effective decision-making mechanism. The heavily burdened Japanese manufacturing industry is difficult for elephants to turn around, and R & D is even more expensive and inefficient.

In 2019, Japan has the largest amount of investment in automobile manufacturing (as a percentage of GDP), but the R & D efficiency and profit margins associated with it are not high. According to preliminary statistics, the profits of Japanese manufacturing enterprises are generally less than 3%, and the steel department of Kobe Steel has been in a state of loss.

On the other hand, it is quite controversial that Japan's "loyalty" culture or the source of fraud. In Japanese corporate culture, we pay great attention to loyalty, whether it is right or wrong, we should be loyal to the enterprise unconditionally. Then, in the hierarchical Japanese enterprises, even if the collective organized fraud, a large number of employees will be obedient, which undoubtedly provides a natural soil for counterfeiting.

Is Japan's auto industry in danger?

Despite the "prevalence" of counterfeiting, the inherent strength of Japan's manufacturing industry can not be ignored.

After decades of accumulation, Japanese manufacturing has accumulated strong technical strength, first of all in patents that are difficult to bypass. At present, Japan has the largest number of core science and technology patents in the world, with a share of more than 80%. Some Japanese manufacturing companies can be "moisturized" just by relying on patent fees.

Second, the parts sector in Japanese manufacturing is still very strong. Take semiconductors, for example, an iPhone phone that earns 30 per cent of its profits from Japanese components. In the current automotive field, it is also difficult to break away from Japanese semiconductor suppliers. For example, Renesas Electronics can be seen in the E3 architecture of Volkswagen ID.4.

In addition, the Japanese auto industry has a mature supply system. Take Toyota as an example, most of the car components are provided by second-tier suppliers in the system, and there are third-and fourth-tier suppliers under the second-tier suppliers. The supply system is quite complete.

However, when we discuss the Japanese automobile industry from a long-term and cultural perspective, the buried crisis has emerged.

Such counterfeiting will gradually separate the Japanese car manufacturing industry from the consumer market. In the short term, counterfeiting in the Japanese auto industry seems harmless, and even some extreme views believe that even if it is counterfeit, the quality of Japanese-made products is still better than that of competitors. However, long-term counterfeiting will have a lasting negative impact on consumers, which will eventually lead to qualitative change.

Close to the market, close to consumers, is the source of the everlasting prosperity of an industry. The early Japanese manufacturing industry became brilliant because of its profound interaction with consumers. If it is separated from the consumer market in the future, the strong parts supply system does not have supporting exports, and it is impossible to grasp the latest consumer preferences sensitively, the competitiveness of the industrial chain will be out of the question.

At a deeper level, the root cause of Japan's manufacturing crisis is the instinctive conflict between Japanese cultural genes and the Internet and the information age. Japan's loyal and introverted cultural identity is intolerable for subversive innovative ideas. Today, we must admit that the quality of this gold-lettered signboard made in Japan is somewhat inadequate.

Editor's summary:

Now, where is the follow-up driving force of Japanese manufacturing? This is a big proposition about the future of Japanese manufacturing. Intelligence and networking are the future direction of the automobile industry. Emerging technology enterprises like Tesla have emerged in the United States, while new car-building enterprises with Internet backgrounds such as Weilai, ideal, and Xiaopeng have emerged in China. In the face of these new forces attacking, the pace has obviously slowed down, which is a question worth pondering. (Wen / Auto House Li Zhengguang / tr. by Phil Newell)