HIDAJournal 2012 AUTUMN

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11HIDA Journal No. 1 ● AUTUMN 2012Y.H SEIKO VIETNAM. JSC.General Director Kazuo YoshinakaNODA VIETNAM CO., LTD.Managing Director Masanao Noda Y.H SEIKO VIETNAM. designs and manu-factures plastic injection molds. Our par-ent company is Yoshinaka Seiko Co., Ltd., an SME located in Fukui Prefecture with a staff of only 13 people. Yoshinaka Seiko has hosted technical intern trainees from Viet-nam each year since 2007. We found that these trainees were very adept at acquiring technical skills. This is because our first two trainees were able to pass Level II of the Na-tional Trade Skills Test (machine process-ing and electro spark machining), which is held entirely in Japanese, in their third year in Japan. I am an executive member of the Hokuriku branch of the Japan Die & Mold Industry Association, and so I had favorably considered expanding our operations to Southeast Asia. This experience helped me make the final decision. However, after researching each country in the region, I found that the areas where most Japanese companies had already expanded were faced with tough price competition. It would be meaningless to spending a large amount of money if we could not make a profit from our opera-tions. As a result, we selected Hanoi as our destination know-ing that many of our existing customers did not have opera-tions there. This is because we wanted to focus on getting a fair assessment of our technologies. This approach was right on tar-get. Today, a little more than four months after we started produc-tion, we have been able to grad-ually capture more new custom-ers. Moreover, in Japan over half of our orders were from tier two suppliers, but now we are receiving orders from tier one suppliers and even manufacturing com-panies. If we continue at this pace, we will be able to record a profit for this fiscal year. However, this also means that the level of quality demanded from our customers has increased considerably. In some cases the products we delivered did not pass a qual-ity inspection by our customer. Neverthe-less, this is actually good news, I believe, because by overcoming these quality issues we can take our technical capabilities to the next level. A lot of money is required to expand op-erations overseas. Purchasing production equipment alone is a major expenditure for such a small company as us. This is why it was impossible for us to purchase land and construct a factory by ourselves. If not for the rental factory, we would not have been able to expand into Vietnam, and could not have made our company stronger. It may be a bit dramatic to say, but TLAF changed the future of our company significantly. NODA VIETNAM is a subsidiary of Noda Corporation (head office in Osaka), which mainly manufactures wooden molds and punch cutting dies. NODA VIETNAM was established in July 2011. We had temporarily expanded into Vietnam the year before by leasing a part of one of our customer’s facto-ries in the country. We got our own factory at the same time as TLAF first opened. We manufacture goods not only for the Viet-nam market, but we also are in charge of overall design, including for orders received in Japan. The cutting die industry has seen mass produced products shift to China and other overseas countries, and yet demand is on the rise for dies used in small lot high variety production that are much more ac-curate. We moved our design division to Vietnam in order to capture this demand with shorter delivery and lower prices. As a result, we respond to orders us-ing a three shift sys-tem where operations run from 6:00am to 10:00pm. We are always con-nected to Skype so that we can have meetings and make confir-mations with people in charge in Japan in real time. Innovations made to the way we manufac-ture have enabled us to ship or-ders received by 4:00pm Japan time (2:00pm Vietnam time) on the very same day if the shape is not too complex. For us, time is also a product. This rental factory is also one of the main reasons why we are able to offer low prices. We did not have to spend a large amount of money to construct our own factory in Vietnam, and we were able to get operations started soon after the company was established. Some rental fac-tories require that you install electrical and water connections, but with TLAF there was no such worry. The short amount of time needed to start operations at our factory was also another key factor that enabled us to of-fer lower prices. However, it takes time to develop local en-gineers. Before, we had about half of our engineers receive training in Japan, which helped create a solid foundation. Today, five of our employees are taking part in training in Japan as part of our effort to develop new human resources. Incidentally, three of these trainees are participating in HIDA training programs. We are committed to growing as a company that helps develop its own people. We are aiming to improve employee satisfaction as well as customer satisfaction in order to de-velop good human resources that will make contributions to society.Managing Director NodaCutting die work floorIntroduction of Apartment Factory Tenant Company (1)Introduction of Apartment Factory Tenant Company (2)General Director YoshinakaInside the factory

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