Uichiro Niwa
Profile
Performance in office
Tenure
Tenure
Background
He joined C. Itoh in 1962. In the mid-1990s, as General Manager of the Business Department, he attended meetings of the Executive Vice Presidents and urged early disposal of bad assets, but was overruled by the more experienced Executive Vice Presidents. He later served as Executive Vice President assisting the President and handling corporate planning, and became President in April 1998. His career had kept him watching, from outside the decision-making, the contents of assets whose disposal had been put off.
Selection
He succeeded Minoru Murofushi as President in April 1998. Interest-bearing debt had swollen to ¥5.2 trillion in the fiscal year ended March 1998, and the company had been posting net losses since that year. Consolidated companies reached 1,027 in the FY ended March 1999, 50-60% of them in the red, and the subsidiaries as a whole lost tens of billions of yen each year. In autumn 1998 the share price briefly fell below ¥200. Right after taking office, Uichiro Niwa set up a special investigation team of about seven people that reexamined the assets through interviews with department and section managers.
Initiatives
On October 13, 1999, at an emergency employee meeting, he announced extraordinary losses of ¥395.0 billion non-consolidated and ¥253.0 billion consolidated. Real estate accounted for ¥183.0 billion, centered on write-downs of ten golf course projects and 20 properties held for sale, and ¥70.0 billion was also booked under impairment accounting on 20 business-use fixed assets such as rental buildings. The company planned to cut its subsidiaries to 700 by March 2001, closing any company that had lost money three years in a row regardless of the reason. The funds came from gains on selling shares of Itochu Techno-Science, which listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 1999.
Career
Career
Itochu
| Date | Position |
|---|---|
| 1962 | Joined |
| Apr 1998 | President |
| Jun 2004 | Stepped down as President and Chairman |