Japanese Companies

The Commerce Department said yesterday that some Japanese companies have been dumping flat-panel display screens -- used mainly on laptop computers -- in the U.S. market.After a six-month preliminary investigation, the department concluded that a handful of Japanese companies were engaging in unfair competition by selling some of their products below the cost of production. The department ordered the companies to pay anti-dumping duties on their imports.The immediate effect will be minimal, since the duties imposed yesterday range from 1.46 percent of the selling prices -- levied against Toshiba -- to 4.6 percent levied against Sharp.

DALIAN, China - When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me: "Finish your dinner - people in China are starving." I, by contrast, find myself wanting to say to my daughters: "Finish your homework - people in China and India are starving for your job." That thought struck me in a visit to Dalian, a port city in northeastern China. It is not just impressive for a Chinese city. With its wide boulevards, beautiful green spaces and nexus of universities, technical colleges and a massive software park, Dalian would stand out in Silicon Valley.

CHICAGO -- A federal judge yesterday approved a $45.4 million settlement in a class-action suit that charged Archer Daniels Midland Co. and two Japanese companies with fixing prices for lysine, a widely-used protein additive for farm animals.U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur called the settlement "fair, reasonable and adequate," noting that fewer than 2 percent of the plaintiffs objected to the settlement.He said the defendants are not liable for attorneys' fees. The other defendants are Ajinomoto Co. and Kyowa Hakko Ltd.Under the settlement, Decatur, Ill.-based Archer Daniels will pay $25 million and the Japanese companies will pay $10.2 million each.

Otsuka made a big splash when it spurned other offers and became one of the first companies to announce that it would build in Montgomery County's new life sciences business park. That was 1983. The Japanese company has been relatively quiet since then, though a large cluster of biotechnology companies grew up around it. But Otsuka's relative obscurity in Maryland may be about to end. Thanks largely to its just-approved schizophrenia drug Abilify, Otsuka America Pharmaceutical Inc. could soon be in the same league with MedImmune Inc., which expects revenue to reach $816 million this year.

Orion Power Holdings Inc., which acquires and operates power plants, said yesterday that it will receive a $200 million investment from two Japanese companies as the Baltimore-based company eyes going public.Under terms of the agreement, the Japanese trading company Mitsubishi Corp. will invest $120 million and Tokyo Electric Power Corp., Japan's largest utility, will invest $80 million in Orion, a joint venture of the New York investment firm, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and an affiliate of Constellation Energy Group, the parent of Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.The Japanese companies will jointly appoint an additional member to Orion's five-member board of directors and receive an undisclosed stake in the company, said Jack Fusco, Orion's chief operating officer.

Benefit gap: Japanese companies that operate in the United States spend more money on employee benefit programs than U.S.-owned firms, the consulting firm KPMG Peat Marwick reports. KPMG found that 56 percent of the Japanese-owned businesses offer a conventional health plan, compared with 37 percent of the American firms. Medical benefits account for 14 percent of the Japanese companies' payroll expenses, compared with 11 percent for their U.S. counterparts.Double duty: The economy is doing better and unemployment is down, but many Americans are worried enough about their own finances to be holding down two jobs.

TOKYO -- Most Japanese companies are not ready to accept the idea of having female employees work at home or provide them withchild care facilities in the corporate workplace, according to a government survey.The Economic Planning Agency conducted the survey to find what working women would need to have children.The most common answers were "fewer working hours," "the ability to work at home," and "day-care centers within the company."Most of the 289 companies with 500 or more employees that responded said they do not have the three programs most cited by the women nor do they have plans to introduce them.

TOKYO Japan's Finance Ministry has begun an investigation into whether Japanese brokerage houses intimidated two Japanese companies into canceling an agreement to issue new bonds through Salomon Brothers, an American brokerage with offices in Tokyo.The ministry's confirmation that the investigation is taking place out of the public eye appears to be a tacit acknowledgement of a discriminatory practice that the ministry has long said does not exist.The case has potentially broader implications, both for American efforts to obtain fairer competition in the Japanese financial markets and for the Finance Ministry's battle to keep other Japanese regulators out of its territory.

TOKYO -- Toshiba Corp. and C. Itoh & Co.'s move to invest $1 billion in a multimedia company to be created by Time Warner Inc. is aimed at gaining access to the U.S. media giant's film and video library and cable television know-how, officials with the Japanese companies said.The officials acknowledged that an agreement in principle among the three companies has been reached involving joint investment in the new entertainment media venture."Since we will be free to use Time Warner's video software, [the capital participation]

TOKYO -- Corporate takeovers in Japan by foreign companies can be expected to increase in numbers and size throughout this decade, says a survey conducted by a private Japanese research organization.The study by the Foundation for Advanced Information and Research says the pace of cross-border corporate mergers and acquisitions is likely to accelerate because of a shortage of Japanese engineers who can be recruited for Japanese companies and the evolution of business strategies.Most of the Japanese companies available for takeovers by foreign corporations have been relatively small.

Orion Power Holdings Inc., which acquires and operates power plants, said yesterday that it will receive a $200 million investment from two Japanese companies as the Baltimore-based company eyes going public.Under terms of the agreement, the Japanese trading company Mitsubishi Corp. will invest $120 million and Tokyo Electric Power Corp., Japan's largest utility, will invest $80 million in Orion, a joint venture of the New York investment firm, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and an affiliate of Constellation Energy Group, the parent of Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.The Japanese companies will jointly appoint an additional member to Orion's five-member board of directors and receive an undisclosed stake in the company, said Jack Fusco, Orion's chief operating officer.

TOKYO -- Under pressure from plant management, nuclear plant workers skipped critical safety steps in order to increase the production of uranium fuel, resulting in an accident that ranks as the worst in this country's atomic energy history, according to a Japanese news report yesterday.The report, carried by Asahi Shimbun, the country's most influential newspaper, and attributed to police investigators, contradicts assertions by officials of JCO Co., a subsidiary of Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. and the operator of the plant, that they had not encouraged the use of production shortcuts.

In its 27 years in the United States, Mazda has been the rotary engine car, the great little car, the Miata company and the company with a minivan.But it has never progressed beyond seventh place -- a distant seventh at that -- in the race to win American car buyers' hearts.The problem?In a cutthroat business in which a carmaker's message must rise above the competition's, Mazda has failed to make itself heard by consumers, industry observers say."Our research shows that a lot of shoppers perceive that Mazda is disappearing," says industry consultant George Peterson, president of Santa Ana, Calif.

Benefit gap: Japanese companies that operate in the United States spend more money on employee benefit programs than U.S.-owned firms, the consulting firm KPMG Peat Marwick reports. KPMG found that 56 percent of the Japanese-owned businesses offer a conventional health plan, compared with 37 percent of the American firms. Medical benefits account for 14 percent of the Japanese companies' payroll expenses, compared with 11 percent for their U.S. counterparts.Double duty: The economy is doing better and unemployment is down, but many Americans are worried enough about their own finances to be holding down two jobs.

CHICAGO -- A federal judge yesterday approved a $45.4 million settlement in a class-action suit that charged Archer Daniels Midland Co. and two Japanese companies with fixing prices for lysine, a widely-used protein additive for farm animals.U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur called the settlement "fair, reasonable and adequate," noting that fewer than 2 percent of the plaintiffs objected to the settlement.He said the defendants are not liable for attorneys' fees. The other defendants are Ajinomoto Co. and Kyowa Hakko Ltd.Under the settlement, Decatur, Ill.-based Archer Daniels will pay $25 million and the Japanese companies will pay $10.2 million each.

TOKYO -- Currency crises are typically too amorphous to produce demonstrable pain, but yesterday's brief surge in the value of Japanese yen to 80 to the dollar raised genuine concerns in Tokyo about an international economic crunch that won't spare America."

TOKYO -- When Nikon Corp., the Japanese camera maker, agreed two weeks ago to pay Honeywell $45 million to settle patent-infringement charges, it became one of the latest casualties in what some people here are calling the "patent wars."With increasing regularity, American companies are demanding, and winning, large royalty payments from Japanese companies for the use of patented technology.But angry Japanese companies are preparing to fight back at what they view as excessive American demands.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- As more and more Japanese companies open for business in the United States, Americans contend that there is a new kind of discrimination: They say Japanese employers are reserving the best jobs for Japanese managers.There are no statistics to document the extent of the problem, and it clearly does not apply to every Japanese employer in the United States. Japanese companies employ less than 1 percent of the 118 million working Americans.But some mighty names in Japanese industry -- Matsushita, Sumitomo, NEC Electronics -- have settled lawsuits charging discrimination against American managers during the past year.

In today's increasingly global economy, job opportunities with the U.S. subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies are likely to grow, and healthy payoffs may await employees who can cross cultural boundaries. U.S. nationals who work for foreign companies typically develop empathy for other cultures and an ability to interact professionally with people from around the world-- solid qualifications for higher-level jobs.Just like international travel, though, working for a foreign company calls for a degree of tolerance.

TOKYO -- After months of optimistic statements, Sony Corp. yesterday became the latest Japanese company to acknowledge serious problems with a landmark U.S. investment, announcing that it was taking $3.2 billion in losses on the value of the Hollywood studios that it acquired only five years ago.In a surprise announcement, Sony said that because of poor box office results, a wave of executive resignations and rising costs, it could never hope to recover its...