Honda has appointed more American locals to executive positions in order to reconnect with its biggest market.
The Detroit News said Honda promoted North American COO, Tetsuo Iwamura, to executive vice president, transferring him to the US, effective 1 April and will now manage production, planning and sales directly from North America, rather than making decisions at its Tokyo headquarters.
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“Honda quite literally has become a North American car company headquartered in Tokyo, and that’s a horrible combination,” Jim Hall, principal of 2953 Analytics, an auto consultantcy, told the paper.
“When your headquarters isn’t in your most important and biggest-volume market, you become disconnected. We can see that’s what’s been happening to them. This is to reconnect headquarters with their most important market.”
The company has hired three Americans for its board including Erik Berkman to head regional product development and design. Iwamura will now work at the company’s US headquarters in Torrance (Los Angeles), California.
“Knowing the current competitive and complicated marketplace, rapid changes in customer needs, we think it’s better to put more emphasis on the American side,” Iwamura said.
“Production and R&D, development facilities, those can be done by investing money. Localisation of the people is one of the key issues.”
According to Iwamura, the best way to boost sales in the US is to have US engineers make product decisions for the local market.
