Japanese Companies

TOKYO -- Japan's largest consumer electronics company has reached an agreement with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service on a formula for calculating its American taxes.The accord uses a new method for reducing disputes over the taxation of multinational corporations, company officials and Japanese tax authorities said yesterday.The agreement comes as President-elect Bill Clinton and members of Congress have been accusing foreign companies that operate in the United States of avoiding taxes by shifting their profits offshore.

In my younger days, I used to wear beaded collars over my sweater. I was going to give them to my daughter. Before I let her play dress-up with them, are they valuable?Anything from the 1950s is growing in value. The Japanese-made beaded collars are selling for $5 to $20, depending on the condition and the intricacy of design. Collars with fur and rhinestones among the "pearls" are especially popular. Don't let your daughter play with them. When she grows up she might want to wear them with her sweater.

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.

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.

Sony Corp. and Yamaha Corp., two venerable Japanese companies, have been hit hard by the worldwide economic slump.Sony Corp. said today that flagging domestic demand for consumer electronics would create the first annual operating loss in its history. The loss was estimated at $156 million for the fiscal year ending March 31. Sony has fallen victim to Japan's rapidly slowing economy and the slump in consumer demand.Meanwhile, Hiroshi Kawakami, president of Yamaha, the world's largest maker of musical instruments, resigned today.

A small California start-up company, EO Inc., has unveiled the first "personal communicator," a hand-held device that combines the capabilities of a pager, phone, fax, computer and electronic organizer.The device, to be available in the second quarter of next year, will be priced from $1,999 to $3,299, depending on options.In addition to AT&T, EO is backed by two Japanese companies, Matsushita Electric Industrial Corp., which makes Panasonic products, and Marubeni Corp., a Japanese trading company.

TOKYO -- After months of fruitless trade negotiations with the Japanese government, the Clinton administration is taking a new tack. It has begun to talk directly to Japanese companies, urging them to buy more foreign products and take other actions on their own to reduce Japan's huge trade surplus.The direct appeal to the companies is partly an effort to circumvent Japan's bureaucrats, whom U.S. officials accuse of being recalcitrant and responsible for the current stalemate in negotiations under a new framework for trade talks agreed to by the two nations in July.

SAN FRANCISCO -- U.S. companies last year increased their share of the worldwide computer chip market for the first time since 1979, largely as a result of strong performances by Intel and Motorola, according to the market research firm Dataquest.But three Japanese companies -- NEC, Toshiba, and Hitachi -- retained the top spots in the annual market share rankings, and analysts said the U.S. gains did not necessarily represent a reversal of the decade-long decline of the American chip industry.

CHICAGO -- Though the 1993 Mazda 626 sedan and MX-6 coupe were conceived in Japan, they'll be American citizens because 75 percent of their parts and components will bear made-in-the-U.S. labels.The cars will be built at Mazda's Michigan plant and sold in the United States, but it's the percentage of domestically supplied parts that allows them to join the same clan as Chevrolet, Ford and Dodge.The Mazdas are the first Japanese car line to be considered domestic, although Japanese companies have built cars here for years.