Toshiba Essay ⋆ Business Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Toshiba Corporation is a Japanese multinational enterprise and the seventh-largest manufacturer of electrical and electronic products in the world. Founded in 1875, Toshiba today consists of 10 in-house companies covering a wide range of products, including bullet trains and power stations as well as electronic consumer goods such as rice cookers, washing machines, and television sets. The company can draw on innovative ideas from more than 30 separate research and development (R&D) laboratories and 352 subsidiaries and affiliates globally. Unusual among large Japanese corporations, Toshiba has faced up to the challenge of globalization and has restructured and streamlined its organization, as well as having developed a shareholder value-oriented business philosophy.

Toshiba was founded in 1939 by the merger of Shibaura Seisaku-sho, which was a producer of electronic goods and which was founded in 1875, and Tokyo Denki, which was a consumer goods producer. Both companies were leaders in their respective fields. The new company was called Tokyo Shibaura Denki (Tokyo Shibaura Electric Co., Ltd.) and the name was not officially changed to Toshiba until 1978.

Since World War II, Toshiba has been part of the Mitsui keiretsu, which represents the typical Japanese conglomerate of affiliated companies. The company grew quickly during the postwar period. This growth was fueled by success in the domestic market as well as through the acquisition of heavy industries firms in Japan. The company’s business fields are broad. Toshiba has developed in various directions, such as into the semiconductor industry, medical systems, power systems, and later into mobile communications and the digital media industry. The brand name Toshiba, however, is most strongly related to the company’s electrical consumer products. The company’s breakthrough as a manufacturer of consumer goods came in 1955, when it launched the first electronic rice cooker on the Japanese market. Within seven years, half of Japanese households owned one of them, a success which laid the foundation of Toshiba’s ongoing role as an innovator and leader in consumer products.

Like many other Japanese multinational corporations, Toshiba’s postwar success was guided and supported by the Japanese government, typical Japanese management practices, and a highly motivated workforce. In contrast to other Japanese manufacturers, Toshiba seemed reluctant to develop overseas production. For many years, the company not only highly concentrated on the Japanese market but also strongly promoted a Japanese relationship-oriented management style inside the corporation.

This focus, however, did not prove to be very successful for the company, and in the 1990s Toshiba was not only confronted with the Japanese recession but also with increasing global competition. The strong appreciation of the Japanese yen put the company, with its many domestic manufacturing sites, under further stress.

In 1996, Taizo Nishimuro became president of Toshiba. He was an unusual choice. Nishimuro was not only the first president who did not have an engineering background, but he had also spent 10 years abroad and spoke fluent English. His appointment symbolized a new era and an increasing readiness to meet the new challenges the company faced. Nishimuro introduced numerous reforms, such as liquidating Toshiba’s unprofitable businesses and cutting the main business groups from 15 to eight. He also introduced profit-oriented evaluation systems and set ambitious goals for the company’s return-one quity and shareholder value.

In the 21st century, Toshiba continues to restructure itself. Atsutoshi Nishida, who became president in 2005, introduced an even stricter concentration and selection policy focusing on businesses and industries that can sustain a long-term competitive advantage. The company concentrates on core competencies and on business in emerging markets. Toshiba has become an outstanding example for Japanese multinational corporations that are in the process of reorganizing in how to stay competitive in the global market. Thus, in contrast to other Japanese multinational corporations, Toshiba has followed a unique path over the past 15 years. It may be considered a role model for the development of Japanese corporations, many of which still need to overcome similar problems to the ones Toshiba faced in the early 1990s.

Bibliography:

Robert L. Cutts, Toshiba: Defining a New Tomorrow (Penguin, 2002);
Mark Fruin, The Japanese Enterprise System: Competitive Strategies and Cooperative Structures (Oxford University Press, USA, 1994);
Mark Fruin, Knowledge Works: Managing Intellectual Capital at Toshiba (Oxford University Press, 1997);
Wataru Nakayama et al., The Japanese Electronics Industry (CRC, 1999).

This example Toshiba Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.