Word: nissan
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These days Ford is a global predator with a $23 billion war chest and a market value ($34 billion) almost four times as big as Nissan's. Racked by an economy in an eight-year decline, Japan has a demonic need for the cash and expertise of foreign bankers and takeover experts who are buying, at deep discount, chunks of the country's financial and industrial base. "What has really happened this decade is the true inability of the Japanese to manage in a difficult situation," says ING Baring Furman Selz managing director Maryann Keller, who has studied Japanese industry...
Only a handful of companies have ever lived up to the Japan Inc. myth, and Nissan isn't one of them. Certainly its manufacturing and engineering prowess are world-class. And Nissan still builds first-rate automobiles. It simply doesn't make the right kind, nor does it know how to sell them. "We've failed to understand what the market wants," Hanawa told TIME early this month. "We're reflecting upon that." Deep meditation is more like it. Nissan has been paralyzed by its own bureaucracy and a legacy of tension between management and labor in Japan...
...over what should be the most drastic restructuring effort in Japanese corporate history. So far he has off-loaded a few subsidiaries (leasing and advertising), banned corporate entertainment and sold the company's 15-story headquarters on Tokyo's glitzy Ginza. In a more dramatic gesture two weeks ago, Nissan Diesel, the group's commercial-truck division, announced it was closing a plant in Gunma, north of Tokyo, and eliminating 3,000 jobs in the process--a radical move...
...hardly radical enough, which is one reason why Hanawa is committing miuri. In one remarkable January week, Nissan became the most talked-about company in the global auto business because everyone with a little extra cash wanted a piece of it. Even tiny Renault piped up that it had French-government backing to acquire a controlling stake in the world's seventh largest carmaker. Renault could afford it because that week Nissan's stock price had sunk low enough so that a 33.4% share (which counts in Japan as a controlling interest) was worth around $2.8 billion--or barely half...
...Nissan still has a lot to offer. Its engine technology is the best in the business, say many experts. And so are its manufacturing plants. The Smyrna, Tenn., factory where it makes the Altima, Sentra and Frontier models has been ranked North America's most efficient for five years (although slow sales idled the plant every Friday for 16 weeks last year). Nissan also offers a window onto Asia's market, which could be a bonanza when it finally recovers...