Word: sanyo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Tomoyo Nonaka took over Sanyo, the struggling Japanese electronics maker, in June 2005, she already had one strike against her. Nonaka was a female CEO in a business culture that is overwhelmingly male. A more timid executive would have charted a cautious course, focusing on slashing costs at a company that lost $1.6 billion in its 2005 fiscal year. But Nonaka, a former TV journalist, instead announced a bold plan to transform Sanyo into a leader in environmentally friendly products. "The 21st century is about turning away from oil to alternate forms of energy," Nonaka, 52, told TIME shortly...
...turned out the old world wasn't ready for Nonaka's vision. Sanyo's losses continued to mount. Nonaka lost the CEO title last year, and she resigned as chairwoman in March. Her radical program, dubbed Think Gaia, "was a very good strategy," says Yasuyuki Onishi, a Tokyo-based financial journalist who wrote a recent book on Sanyo's woes. "But it wasn't the right time to think Gaia. Sanyo had to think for itself...
That's because the economics of green products still don't make sense for many items. Take solar power, where Sanyo is a significant competitor. Although numerous start-ups in the U.S., China and Taiwan have been investing in the technology over the past two years, generating electricity from solar panels is still at least twice as expensive as buying it from the fossil fuel--reliant U.S. utility grid. Experts say the solar-power industry will need support from government subsidies and incentives for years to come...
...Nonaka, however, chose to take a long-term approach, anticipating that environmental concerns in coming years would become an increasingly important factor in consumer buying decisions. She reorganized Sanyo's 300 subsidiaries into three divisions: environment, energy and lifestyle. The company began marketing new products such as a battery that could be recharged with a solar panel and a washing machine that recycled water. These moves were a hard sell at a proud manufacturing company like Sanyo, which started by making bicycle lamps in 1947. "What Sanyo does best is make batteries and industrial air systems and refrigerators," says Hideyo...
...Ultimately, it was even harder to convince outside investors including Goldman Sachs and Daiwa Securities, which had sunk billions of dollars into a Sanyo turnaround, to be patient. The reality is that Sanyo, saddled with $14.7 billion in debt on Sept. 30, according to the company's most recent financial reports, only had the resources to restructure, not revolutionize. With Nonaka gone, analysts expect Sanyo will sell losing divisions while focusing on its best product: rechargeable batteries. That strategy could return Sanyo to profitability, but it won't make the company one that "solves the problems that the world...