Word: yens
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...SUPERSTRONG YEN SHOULD DRIVE up the price of parts that Japanese businessman Toshinori Minohara makes for office copiers and force him out of the market. But Minohara is turning the currency's power into an opportunity: instead of expanding in Japan, he recently opened a plant in the city of Dongguan, China, where cheap wages will lower his manufacturing costs. "Nowadays I show my buyers a part that costs 1,500 yen," says Minohara. "But very soon we will be making this in China, and it will cost 1,000 yen. That's how we keep our customers coming back...
While nimble executives like Minohara have coped with the strong yen and its relentless rise since January, Japanese business leaders were shaken last week when the currency soared to a record 80.15 to the U.S. dollar. (The dollar fetched 240 yen 10 years ago.) Tokyo responded by slashing the Japanese central bank's discount rate from 1.75% to a record low of 1%. The idea was to make any interest-bearing Japanese investment less attractive to foreign investors who might then choose to put their money in dollar-denominated bonds and thus strengthen demand for that currency. The government also...
...Japan has some good reasons not to fret too much over its $66 billion trade surplus with the U.S. and the strong yen that it produces. The currency makes foreign investments cheap and helps Japanese firms build factories around the world, especially in Asia. In America, Japanese automakers for the first time last year produced more cars and trucks than they exported from Japan. That turned around Japan's faltering share of the U.S. automotive market, from...
Some powerful companies have even managed to raise their prices during the yen's ascent without fear of losing business. These companies, with names like Kyocera and Minebea, control vast global markets for little-known but essential items such as ceramic packages for semiconductors and precision-engineered ball bearings for jet engines. In a controversial new book called Blindside, journalist Eamonn Fingleton argues that these firms help ensure that Japan will overtake the U.S. as the world's leading economy by the year 2000. "Their success to date has been greater than most Americans realize," he writes, "and constitutes...
...more competitive fields, the mighty yen has had the effect of making Japanese companies sharpen their edge by trimming payrolls and shifting work abroad. In the past two years, for example, Nissan has closed an assembly plant near Tokyo and eliminated 5,000 jobs, or 7.5% of its Japanese work force. "They just responded by becoming more efficient,'' says Geoffrey Barker, chief of research at the Smith New Court Securities firm in Tokyo...