Closing Sayama, consolidating domestic output at Yorii (2017)

Domestic restructuring as the flip side of expansion

At the centre of this decision is the question of how to fold up, in the face of shrinking demand and electrification, the map of production spread out during the expansion era. Honda, which began its “build where you sell” expansion at Marysville in North America in 1978, had on the reverse side kept building up domestic capacity as well. The closure of Sayama amounts to subtracting from within the domestic facilities that had swelled under the logic of expanding outward. That it put a hand to its very first four-wheel plant — not at the height of good times but while pressed by market contraction and the weight of electrification investment — shows a character different from the era of piling expansion upon expansion.

This restructuring does not complete itself in isolation. The move to fold up Sayama overlapped in time with the withdrawal from finished-car production in Europe through the closure of the Swindon plant in Britain, and with the rejuvenation of the workforce through the Life Shift Program — all of them tied to the higher proposition of concentrating resources on electrification, set out in the 2021 pledge to move beyond the engine. Yet uncertainty still remains over the outlook for electrification, and the question of how far to narrow domestic production seems to have been left hanging thereafter. The Sayama plant, closed over seven years, remained a miniature of a Honda domestic business swaying between expansion and contraction.