Disregard for clients behind product quality scandals

November 30, 2017

Tokyo- Prestigious textile producer Toray Industries Inc. has joined the ranks of Japanese manufacturers involved in product quality data falsification, after Kobe Steel Ltd. and Mitsubishi Materials Corp.

Their groups shipped products that did not meet quality requirements of clients without telling them, assuming that minor deviations from the standards would cause no safety problems.

A common attitude among them is disregard for clients.

At Toray, wholly owned subsidiary Toray Hybrid Cord Inc. manipulated quality data for tire materials and other products and shipped nonconforming products to clients.

The products in question "deviate from required specifications only slightly and are essentially no different from products that meet the requirements," Toray President Akihiro Nikkaku told a press conference Tuesday.

"No client has reported safety problems," he stressed, referring to tire cords, which are among the affected products. He insisted that the cords, used to strengthen tires, were only one pct short of the client requirement of 10 times the minimum level required to secure product safety.

The data falsification was conducted "as minor deviations were arbitrarily interpreted as not abnormal, given the nature of the products," said Toray Hybrid Cord President Nobuhiro Suzuki.

This attitude was shared by Kobe Steel and Mitsubishi Materials.

At Kobe Steel, "workers believed that there was no problem rewriting figures unless customers complained," according to a report on the outcome of internal probes released earlier this month.

The scandals also showed slow responses of the management teams to their companies' irregularities.

It took eight months before shipments of nonconforming products were halted by one of the Mitsubishi Materials subsidiaries involved in the misconduct. The group spent another month to disclose the problem.

Toray took 16 months to make public the irregularities by the subsidiary.

Online postings and a number of inquiries led Toray to announce the misconduct, Nikkaku said.

Toray and Mitsubishi Materials would not have disclosed the problem unless the data fabrication scandal emerged at Kobe Steel in early October, industry sources said.

At a press conference Wednesday, industry minister Hiroshige Seko expressed his deep regrets that the product quality data falsification problem has spread to Toray.

"I hope other companies will also conduct internal checks and disclose any such miscondct as soon as possible if there is any," he said. Jiji Press