Angry shareholders confronted Nidec\u2019s board at the motor manufacturer\u2019s annual meeting on Thursday, following a tumultuous year marred by accounting scandals, manufacturing defects and the ouster of its charismatic founder.<\/p>\n
CEO Mitsuya Kishida, 66, whose reappointment as director was approved on the same day, faced a barrage of questions from investors about Nidec\u2019s survival, as well as deep skepticism about his plan to turn the business around.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy goal is to create a company where people feel empowered to say \u2018no,\u2019 where we can pause and rethink when top-down initiatives fail and where we find solutions as a team,\u201d Kishida said. \u201cThis will require long-term dedication; I want to establish a solid road map and execute it with integrity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nidec has been in turmoil since the world\u2019s largest maker of precision motors disclosed accounting issues last year that spanned across subsidiaries in Italy, Switzerland and China, as well as its car inverter business. Earlier this year, the scandal forced the company to part ways with founder and former CEO Shigenobu Nagamori, 81, whose hard-charging leadership style was blamed for creating an unrelenting culture seen as a root cause of widespread fraud.<\/p>\n
Compounding the long-running accounting issues, Nidec last month disclosed quality-control misconduct involving motors and products it supplies to other companies. More than 1,000 instances were found in products without customers\u2019 knowledge, with the majority in household appliances. Japan\u2019s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission may take administrative or even criminal action if the misconduct is deemed serious, the Nikkei newspaper reported last week.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve lost my patience with Nagamori,\u201d said shareholder Jiro Suzuki, who had owned Nidec stock for 20 years but sold half of his holdings after the first round of financial misconduct emerged last year. \u201cIt\u2019s best to have someone young running the business.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nidec\u2019s stock has been removed from Japan\u2019s Nikkei 225 and Topix indexes, while the Tokyo Stock Exchange has said it may delist the company if it can\u2019t show improvement in internal management. Even so, Nidec\u2019s stock has bounced back more than 30% this year, after losing a quarter of its value in 2026.<\/p>\n
Activist investor Oasis Management revealed a stake in Nidec in March, calling for sweeping governance reforms at the company. It said in May that it now owns 6.8% of the firm and plans to make proposals aimed at improving corporate oversight, along with protecting or raising corporate and shareholder value.<\/p>\n
Nagamori remains a top shareholder in Nidec.<\/p>\n
Japanese authorities had been scrutinizing the once-admired manufacturer since last year, when cases of improper bookkeeping surfaced at subsidiaries in Italy, Switzerland and China, as well as within its core automotive electric-motor inverter business.<\/p>\n
Nidec\u2019s internal probe revealed it spent years…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Angry shareholders confronted Nidec\u2019s board at the motor manufacturer\u2019s annual meeting on Thursday, following a tumultuous year marred…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45366,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[217,215,3142,5384,214,216,51,31848,4787,19334,260],"class_list":["post-45365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-business-of-japan","tag-corporate-governance","tag-fraud","tag-japans-business","tag-japanese-business","tag-manufacturing","tag-mitsuya-kishida","tag-nidec","tag-shigenobu-nagamori","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}