Nobuhiko Kawamoto
Profile
Performance in office
Tenure
Tenure
Background
A career employee, he was promoted from Senior Managing Director to President in June 1990. He came up through development, and after becoming President he appointed people from sales, production and purchasing as chief development officers, breaking down the self-satisfied culture of the engineers known as the "R&D aristocracy." He placed no Executive Vice President beneath him, concentrating decisions in the President alone. He had neither blood ties to the founding family nor a shareholding to back him.
Selection
In June 1990 he succeeded Tadashi Kume as President. In the fiscal year ended March 1990, just before, non-consolidated ordinary income was ¥90.5 billion, but by the FY ended March 1994, with the bursting of the bubble and a strong yen combined, it had fallen to a quarter at ¥22.7 billion. On New Year's Day 1995, a speculative article that Honda Motor and Mitsubishi Motors would merge ran as the top front-page story in a newspaper. It originated in bankers' calculations that Mitsubishi Motors, riding high on RVs, and Honda, clinging to passenger cars, would complement each other.
Initiatives
He rejected the merger talk, aiming for a company that could respond quickly to change rather than one built on economies of scale. In 1993 he set a goal of raising domestic sales from just over 600,000 units to 800,000 by 1998, and shifted development investment, of which only 5% had gone to domestic-only models, toward the home market. The Odyssey in autumn 1994, the CR-V in autumn 1995, and the Step WGN and S-MX in 1996 sold well one after another. Non-consolidated ordinary income for the fiscal year ended March 1997 reached ¥155.0 billion, 3.3 times the previous year.
Career
Career
Honda Motor
| Date | Position |
|---|---|
| Jun 1990 | President |
| Jun 1998 | Stepped down as President |