未分類
2019.5.20
下請けの苦悩を英語で！
今日はこのテーマを英語にします。
中小零細から中堅へ、そして大企業へと成長するには何が必要か？
創業初期の京セラの1番のお得意さんは松下さんというお話でした。松下さんの要求は大変厳しかったと稲盛氏はおっしゃいます。
松下さんに部品を収めている中小企業の親父さんには、二通りのタイプがありました。3分の2位の人たちは大変な不満を持っていて、「松下も最初は中小企業やったやないか。それからちょっと大きくなったら、威張りくさって」などとしょっちゅう文句を言っていました。しかし結局そんなところは大抵つぶれました。私はそんな文句を言っても始まらないと思い、値切るのならば値切ってみろ。それでも自分は頑張るとばかりに最後には開き直ってしまいました。・・・もういくらでも結構ですよ、値段はそちらで決めてください。そのかわり一度決めたら、もうそれ以上の値引きは言わないでください。私がどのように努力し、どれだけ儲けようと黙っていてください。するとべらぼうに安い値段を提示されましたが、私は黙ってその「言い値」を飲みました。
そしてどうやったらその値段で採算が取れるか、必死に考えました。大学出の従業員には、「大学で少しは勉強してきたやろう。品物をどう安く作るか考えるのが、勉強してきた値打ちや。とにかく、どこよりもとことん安く作れる方法を考えて欲しい」と指示して、みんなで生き残りの道を探りました。大企業に値切られ、生き血を吸われると発想した経営者は自滅し、私のように「下請けいじめは愛のムチ」と発想してその困難に敢然と立ち向かったところだけが生き残ったわけです。
How to survive under very competitive request come from OEM structure. -Squeezed or trained? –
Q: What are the two types of vendors?
A: One is those venders who had been believing that they had been squeezed by Matsushita. They thought that Matsushita started as a small company and they should know how hard it would be for small businesses to survive. “Matsushita could survive even getting more generous. How come they come to us to taking our bloods?? They have no mercy, haven’t they? “This is the basic idea of type one business owners. We call them as “Victimized entrepreneurs”. On the other hand, there were small number of venders who were willing to have price reduction request. Mr.Inamori, of course who was fallen into this category, thought that complaining never solves the situation. If Matsushita wishes to ask us the price reduction, we should deal with that. This is his idea. We call such category of entrepreneurs as “Good-faith challengers”.
Q: What happened to the “Victimized entrepreneurs”?
A: Over the years, according to Mr. Inamori, those victimized entrepreneurs had disappeared from competition. Some shut down their doors and others sold their businesses.
Q: Why were they not able to survive?
A: Obviously, they were not well motivated to survive. Their intention was always toward Matsushita and directed Matsushita’s attitudes to them. They had never looked themselves again, made their best effort to improve their production process, nor piling up small but effective changes to reduce their sales price. If they had taken the initial action, we feel they could have survived more but they certainly spent more time to look for more generous purchaser for their products.
Q: What did Mr. Inamori do for this OEM price battle?
A: Mr. Inamori kept demonstrating his strong commitment towards maintaining their business relation with Panasonic. Inamori said to Panasonic, “Ok, now you decide whatever price you would like to purchase from us. You are the one who set out the price, however, once you propose, please stick with it. NO more reduction we accept. Please do not intervene us any further price negotiation no matter how much we generate our profit from the agreed price point. We are confident to drastically change our production process until we get enough profit.”
Then he started developing his strategy on how Kyocera can reduce the cost.
Q: At the end, was Mr. Inamori successful?
A: Yes, he was. According to his words, Kyocera kept piling up their innovative details in their production process, and achieved profitable model under the proposed price.
Q:What was the lesson learned from this episode?
A: Those who lost were the “Victimized entrepreneurs” while those survived were the “Good-faith challengers”, who always believed that Panasonic had trained them to grow a globally competitive company. The important lesson from this episode is your mind set, either feeling get squeezed or trained. This obviously determines your business and life outcomes.
* Mr. Kazuo Inamori, the founder of Kyocera, KDDI (one of the top tele communication companies in Japan) and the top of revitalization project of JAL. As a well-known Japanese entrepreneur, he has been sharing his experiences and management know-how with managements of small to middle companies in Japan.
