Global Economy: Japan

JAPAN

INTRODUCTION

Japan is ranking at the third position in term of global economy. Thus, its GDP scores at 5.96 trillion USD, according to the World Bank stats. As a matter of fact, the « Japan miracle » is mainly due to its exports strategy and management, which were the state of the art in the management field in the 1990s. The Japan economy has fought since WWII with its eternal enemy called deflation. Its private and public debt to GDP ratio are sky rocking to the biggest debt ratio in the world with more than 200%, the only reason why its economy is not that impacted, is due to the debt holder that are mainly Japanese and its economy that is very protective (OECD economic surveys, 2013).

As every country in the world it has suffered from the global recession. This is due to its reliability on the export mechanism and its close link to the US economy. On top of that the nuclear crisis of Fukushima implied by a major earthquake did not help the Japanese economy to recover fastly. (OECD outlook report, 2013)

HISTORY AND MAIN SHIPYARDS

The stats provided by the government suggests there are over 1 000 shipyards in Japan for the year 2013. The Japanese market is divided up into privately owned yards individual enterprises, and the other part of the market belongs to privates or publics listed companies that have several yards. There is what is called the “big three”, which is the three biggest companies that control the Japanese shipbuilding industry - measured by current order books (in compensated gross tonnage – CGT). Those companies are Imabari Shipbuilding, Tsuneishi Holdings, and the Oshima Shipbuilding Company. These three companies, as well as Universal Shipbuilding, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Na...

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...ance, some industry players are changing their business focus by changing the type of vessel constructed (Clarkson 2012, p. 25).

The strategy implemented mainly depend on the investment made on R&D. indeed, the relation between R&D expenses and new skills and improving of productivity is high. Moreover, improving the shipyard has been a current trend followed by the main players of the industry. It also improves the productivity and efficiency of the sector (OECD report shipbuilding Japan, 2013).

Eventually, in order to reorganize themselves some companies have decided to join forces in the contest of merger and acquisition. For instance Universal Shipbuilding and IHI Marine United have merged into, Japan Marine United. This decision was made to streamline costs and leverage the knowledge in engineering to improve productivity (Hellenic News, 2012).