トヨタの電気と燃料セルの将来車
Toyota concepts await show
Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2011
By HIROKO NAKATA Staff writer
Ahead of next month's Tokyo Motor Show, Toyota Motor Corp. on Tuesday unveiled two fuel-efficient concept cars, one an electric vehicle and the other a fuel-cell vehicle.
New wheels: Toyota Motor Corp.'s Aqua hybrid, which will be unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show in December, is shown in a handout photograph. KYODO
The concept EV, called the FT-EVIII, has better range and speed characteristics than previous models. The auto giant has said it aims to start selling electric vehicles in 2012.
The FT-EVIII has a range of 105 km on a full charge, and it has a maximum speed of 125 kph.
The earlier FT-EVII concept car unveiled at last year's motor show can run 90 km and has a maximum speed of 100 kph.
Toyota also took the wraps off the fuel-cell concept car FCV-R, based on a sedan. It is more compact than the previous FCV, which was based on a sport utility vehicle like the Toyota Kluger.
The carmaker said it plans to release fuel-cell vehicles onto the market by around 2015.
Toyota also unveiled a prototype compact hybrid that it plans to launch in late December.
The car, called the Aqua in Japan and Prius c in other countries, can travel 35 km on 1 liter of fuel.
The Tokyo Motor Show, which opens to the public on Dec. 2, will feature 15 Japanese auto brands and 25 foreign makers.
Insight: Dynamic CEOs defy Japan Inc's decline
By Linda Sieg and James Topham
TOKYO | Mon Apr 2, 2012 6:06pm EDT
TOKYO (Reuters) - When Yusaku Maezawa quit playing drums in a punk band to devote himself full-time to his business selling Tokyo street fashion on the Internet, his main goal was to have fun.
Twelve years later, Maezawa, 36, is the billionaire CEO of online fashion retailer Start Today, one of a clutch of growing firms led by a different breed of executives determined to avoid the errors of the global Japanese brands whose faltering fortunes are making Japan Inc synonymous with decline.
"I was in danger of becoming a 'salaryman musician'," Maezawa said in an interview at his company headquarters in a high-rise office building outside Tokyo, where framed T-shirts hand-sprayed by company executives with letters spelling out "NO WAR" adorn the entrance.
"On the other hand, the company was growing dynamically, I was meeting new people to work with and I heard customers were happy, so it felt like there was more dynamism and growth," added Maezawa, who named his firm for an album by punk band Gorilla Biscuits.
The company, which now has about 400 full-time employees, expects operating profits to rise by more than 46 percent to 8.56 billion yen ($104 million) in the year just ended.
Maezawa, whose firm listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's start-up section in 2007 and graduated to the first section in February, may be rare in preaching fun as a management gospel.
"I want to destroy the old concept that a company is a place where one sacrifices time for the sake of money," he said with an impish grin, confessing he now works a four-day week.
But his commitment to innovation and a laser-like focus on making consumers happy are shared traits experts agree set off Japan's emerging successes from once-proud but now-struggling firms such as Sony and Panasonic.
And it's not just those storied electronics groups that are at risk of being left behind in today's fast changing world. The stock market barometer, the Nikkei average, has dropped 74 percent from the heady highs of late-1989.
"Many people just rely on their past success, but things are moving and changing so fast, you need to self-innovate," Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of e-commerce operator and Amazon rival Rakuten Inc, told Reuters in a telephone interview as he travelled by car through Tokyo.
"Even Rakuten, if we stop, I think we are going to decline very rapidly. That's the new rule of the game," said Mikitani, whose firm, set up in 1997, now employs over 7,000 people and posted group operating profit of 71.34 billion yen last year.
Experts say more such success stories - found in sectors ranging from retail, Internet and mobile games to niche manufacturers - could help revive a Japanese economy stuck in the doldrums for decades and saddled with an ageing population.
Maezawa is a high school graduate; Mikitani studied at Harvard Business School. Several stand-out CEOs founded start-ups but others built up a family business or head an established firm.
What these executives do have in common, though, is an individualism rare in Japan's often staid business circles.
"Japanese society is changing and independent types are increasing, and every year more people are trying venture businesses," said Tatsuyuki Negoro, a professor at Waseda University's IT Strategy Institute.
"The question is whether things can change in time before Japan sinks."
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Factors behind the well-chronicled decline of famed Japanese brands are legion, including an inability to ditch loss-making divisions and focus on core businesses, an obsession with building 'better' products that consumers don't want, and risk-averse 'salaryman CEOs' hobbled by a search for consensus.
Those management mindsets have contributed to the woes of companies such as Sony, Panasonic and Sharp, set to lose a combined $17 billion in the year to end-March.
"Japan is seeking something like stability," said Tadashi Yanai, 63, listed by Forbes as Japan's richest man with family assets of $10 billion, and CEO of Asia's largest apparel retailer, Fast Retailing. "Stability is fine, but if you try to be stable without a desire to grow, there is no stability.
"I think the biggest problem is that that awareness has faded," Yanai said at his biggest store just days before it opened last month in Tokyo's glitzy Ginza district as part of a bid to rejuvenate profits for casual clothing chain Uniqlo by burnishing the brand at home and expanding abroad.
For Yanai - a second-generation retailer and author of a book titled "One Victory, Nine Failures" - and other successful CEOs, fear of failure isn't part of their management lexicon.
"Without knowing what I was going to do, I decided to jump off the cliff," said Mikitani, recalling his decision in 1995 to quit a job at the then-prestigious Industrial Bank of Japan and start his own firm - a move he says he'd never contemplated until the bank sent him to study at Harvard Business School.
Kohey Takashima, 38, whose online grocery firm Oisix Inc has yet to list publicly but who already dreams of expanding in Asia, said he has never calculated the cost of failure.
"I didn't think about the risk, because I didn't think I would fail," said Takashima, who worked for consultancy McKinsey & Co before starting his company with college friends.
"If you think you might fail, you won't take the risk," said Takashima, whose company in 2008 won the Porter Prize for innovative companies, named after Harvard Professor Michael Porter, author of the book "Can Japan Compete?"
A clear focus on satisfying consumers rather than mindlessly upgrading technological quality is another characteristic of the newer breed of thriving firms, experts and executives say.
"Companies that are struggling focus on product features, added functions, physical features. But by producing these, they don't really satisfy the consumer," said Shintaro Okubo, partner at consulting firm Bain & Co's Tokyo office.
"Those that are doing well are not bringing new features or functions, but entertaining the consumer."
Rakuten's Mikitani hopes that approach can differentiate his "online shopping mall" model from global giant Amazon, as he pushes overseas through M&A deals, though analysts say he may struggle in developed markets where Amazon has a big head start.
"People like to buy products and be proud of it, not just the product, but the process," Mikitani said in the fluent English he insists his executives must learn.
"Of course, price and convenience are also very important, but our strategy or way of thinking of our business (is that) shopping is not just about convenience and price, it's about experience and communication."
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