Fortune magazine yesterday named Canon president Fujio Mitarai as its Asian business leader of the year, hailing him for turning around a Japanese company where others have sought foreign bosses.
Mitarai, who takes over in May as head of the Japan Business Federation, the country's top industry lobby, "may be the best Japanese CEO in a decade," Fortune's Asia editor Clay Chandler said.
"His willingness to make tough choices early and independently is the difference between success at Canon and the mess at Sony," he wrote.
"The turnaround may not have been as dramatic as Nissan's, but changes at that company came at the hands of a Western CEO and only after foreign investors gained management control," Chandler said.
"Mitarai turned Canon around before being forced to by outsiders," he added.
Once debt-ridden Canon has grown to Japan's largest maker of digital cameras and office automation equipment, widely regarded as one of the companies leading Japan's economic recovery.
The 70-year-old Mitarai, who joined Canon at 26 and has spent his entire career there, is known as an advocate of the classic Japanese company approach, as opposed to the vertical-style "American" management.
Nissan, by contrast, recovered from the brink of oblivion in 1999 to profit under Carlos Ghosn, a Brazilian-born Frenchman of Lebanese descent who is now CEO at France's Renault, which controls the company.
Last year Sony, the global electronics maker, entrusted Howard Stringer, a Welsh-born former television journalist in the US, to be its new chief in a bid to restore its dynamism.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has