Building the volume plant in Haiphong and splitting development from manufacturing (1996)

Hand over the volume, keep the finishing

What was placed in Haiphong in 1996 was volume production of standard products, not the processes that touch the customer. Frames, covers and software were fitted in the country where the equipment was going, and low-volume custom work was finished in Japan. President Sakitani Fumio put it as keeping the places where value is added in Japan. The division of processes began from a judgement made as customer IC makers, finding domestic production uneconomic, shifted manufacturing overseas: that maintenance alone in the destination countries would not amount to a business.

The balance of that division, however, shifted over time. Of 4,402 consolidated employees in the year to February 2025, 3,063 are gathered in Haiphong, while the parent in Fukuyama holds only 244. Rather than design and volume production being separated, the structure has become one in which the country doing the manufacturing holds most of the people. That a typhoon in 2024 affected production was arguably the other side of the same coin. A design that entrusts volume production to a single country lowers costs and, at the same time, means taking on that country’s circumstances as your own.