Word: machida
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...collection of rising Japanese artists who are as well schooled in their country's artistic traditions as they are eager to remake them. Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art identified the trend with its 2006 exhibition No Border: From Nihonga to Nihonga, which showcased talents like Matsui and Kumi Machida, whose idiosyncratic ink portraits of macabre toylike figures are the product of supreme painterly skill. You could call these painters "neo-nihonga," a term popularized by the album-cover designer turned fine artist Hisashi Tenmyouya, whose brilliantly colored acrylic paintings tweak symbols of Japanese nationalism and culture. They...
Sharp's momentum has been a drag for struggling Sony, which recently brought in a non-Japanese CEO, Howard Stringer, to orchestrate a turnaround. Sony also demonstrates Machida's theory: the company has lost its primacy in TVs, and it shows. In July, Sony reported a quarterly loss of $330 million in its consumer-electronics division. Sharp, meanwhile, posted operating profits of $138 million for its consumer-products division...
Surprisingly, Machida's strategy of concentrating on businesses in which the company has a significant edge is rare in corporate Japan, where a bias toward bulking up still reigns. Gerhard Fasol, president of Eurotechnology Japan, a tech consultancy in Tokyo, says, "The Toshibas and Hitachis of this world are in about 20 or 30 different industry areas. There is no focus." Even in secondary business lines, Sharp tries to develop what it calls one-of-a-kind products. A recent example: the new Healsio oven that reduces fat and salt content by cooking with superheated steam. The oven...
Even in his core business of manufacturing LCDs, Machida is playing to Sharp's strengths and avoiding margin-killing commodity products. Taking on Goliaths like LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics across every LCD product line would be foolish, he says. They're dominant, for example, in mass-market LCD panels used in smaller, cheaper TVs and in laptops. Rather than engage them in a murderous price war, Sharp concentrates almost exclusively on ever larger TVs or on small, high-quality panels found in cell phones, car navigation systems and handheld game players like Sony's PSP and Nintendo...
However the contest between PDP and LCD plays out, Machida and his team are--for now--relishing their moment in the sun. Hisakazu Torii, a director of research at DisplaySearch, a consultancy in Tokyo, says Sharp's foresight in LCDs has completely transformed the TV business and Sharp's position in the corporate landscape. "Sharp can sell its TVs for $200 to $300 more than Sony, which is a total reversal of the old situation," he says. Sharp's international-business director, Toshishige Hamano, agrees, saying, "In the long history of the electronics market, all companies have their moment...