Auto firms set to resume full operations

Local vehicle assemblers that had to scale down operations following the Japan crisis will go back to running at pre-crisis levels by October or November, as the situation in Japan starts to go back to normal.

Nobuo Fujii, vice president and executive director of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Philippines, said Japanese auto assemblers in the country would be operating at 70 percent capacity within the month, with full operations to resume by October or November.

He related that among the around 500 members of the Japanese Chamber in the country, auto makers were the most affected by the earthquake that hit northern Japan last March 11.

Those in the electronics sector—to which a big chunk of Japanese companies operating here belongs—were not affected as much, he said.

In a separate interview, Toshiba Information Equipment (Philippines) Inc. president and director Yoshiyuki Yano said the company even registered record sales and shipments in May—a time when Japanese firms were supposed to be reeling from the crisis.

“We had record production in terms of number last month. The crisis had no impact on us. Actually, it had little impact on the semiconductor industry,” he said.

This, he said, was primarily because TIP sourced only around 10 percent of its raw materials from Japan. The bulk of the components it needed to produce hard disk drives, optical disk drives, and printed circuit boards at its Laguna plant came from various countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, including the Philippines.

Citing a survey conducted by the Japan External Trade Organization around two weeks after the disaster, Fujii said 30-40 percent of Japanese firms operating here said they were “very much affected” by the crisis.

The rest, however, said the earthquake hardly had an impact on their business.

At this point, Fujii said it was difficult to quantify by how much the affected firms had already recovered. Another survey on the effects of the disaster could be conducted during the latter part of the year to determine this.

Meanwhile, he related that Japanese firms affected by the crisis were not really looking for new locations for their businesses, opting instead to just rebuild in Japan.