Word: matsushita
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...whatever it takes to win. Laurent de Wilde Paris Sharp Businessman Your article on the sharp corp., Japan's hottest electronics firm, and its president, Katsuhiko Machida, showed that slow and steady wins the race [May 9]. That's exactly how Machida overtook Sharp's rivals Sony, Matsushita and Samsung. When Machida was running Sharp's television business in the 1980s, the company was struggling, and most people knew nothing about him. But when Sharp brought its liquid-crystal-display TVs to the global market, it began making record profits. To be the best, a company has to have sound...
...easy for Katsuhiko Machida, the president of Sharp Corp., to look back and laugh now, given that he's running Japan's hottest electronics company. But for years he was despondent, wondering if Sharp would forever be overshadowed by giants like Sony, Matsushita and Samsung. When he ran Sharp's television business in the 1980s, Machida says the firm had trouble competing because it didn't manufacture the most important TV component, the cathode-ray tube. Forced to cobble together parts bought from competitors, Sharp was essentially an assembler, cranking out televisions that were always a little too expensive...
...screens. But Sharp's competitors have also joined the race. A joint venture between LG Electronics and Royal Philips Electronics is spending $5.1 billion to create the world's largest plant for LCDs, while Sony and Samsung are teaming up for a $2 billion LCD venture. Hitachi, Toshiba and Matsushita have similarly joined forces, and even Dell, the American computer maker, is getting into the flat-panel game. For now, however, Sharp is happy to go it alone, hoping that it's strong enough technologically to maintain its leadership position without a partner. It's a gamble...
...manufactured in clean-room factories that require massive investment. Ten new plants costing around $20 billion will start up between now and the end of 2005, increasing the industry's production capacity by 70% next year. Even more are on the drawing board. In August, Japan's Hitachi, Matsushita and Toshiba announced a $1 billion joint venture to produce LCD panels starting...
Spearheading one camp is Sony, which is promoting a technology it calls Blu-ray. Sony quickly enlisted Matsushita, Philips and Pioneer, among others, as allies in its cause. All was going well in this spirit of selfless cooperation, Sony claims, until Toshiba decided to ruin the party. "We have had many, many meetings with Toshiba," says project director Kiyoshi Nishitani. But when it came to explaining the benefits of joining the alliance, he adds with a shake of his head, "we could not get them to understand...