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Japanese Metal Manufacturer Faked Specifications To Hundreds of Companies (jalopnik.com)
Last week, Kobe Steel admitted that staff fudged reports on the strength and durability of products requested by its clients -- including those from the airline industry, cars, space rockets, and Japan's bullet trains. The company estimated that four percent of aluminum and copper products shipped from September 2016 to August 2017 were falsely labelled, Automotive News reported.
But on Friday, the company's CEO, Hiroya Kawasaki, revealed the scandal has impacted about 500 companies -- doubling the initial count -- and now includes steel products, too. The practice of falsely labeling data to meet customer's specifications could date back more than 10 years, according to the Financial Times.
For rockets the concern is less serious as they generally are not built for a long lifespan, but for airplanes and cars this news could be devastating, requiring major rebuilds on many operating vehicles.
Sell supplies and advertise twice the lifetime they actually have. Fold the company, let the scandal go public after investing in the company most likely to get rich fixing the problems caused by your fraud.
Double the profit, double the fun!
How long until there is a documentable claim that this behavior killed somebody?
Next question that comes to mind: How long until I find out if my car was built with substandard materials?
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I've been hearing about Kobe on English language broadcasts for a while. One constant throughout is a complete lack of contextual information.
We all know they "Falsified data" on strength and durability of aluminum and copper... what does this mean in real terms?. Did they just check the "A-OK" box and fill in fake data without bothering to run the tests? Did they run the tests and then knowingly alter results? What is the difference between what they reported and actual conditions of materials sold? What is the risk? I would be most interested in any references that address these basic questions.
So far every downstream manufacturer who has looked into this has not been able to find anything wrong or at least they are not admitting it publically.
Always the MBAs fault. The customer totally wanted to spend more on the product so you could do you testing in house, but those damn MBAs, ruining everything.
Actually, this is a common cycle. Post-WWII, Japanese stuff was considered crap. The country was war-torn and rebuilding its industrial base. Most emphasis was put on volume of production and expansion, little on quality.
As Japan modernized and "got" how to produce quality consistently, it earned a reputation for making the best stuff in the world. Korea and Taiwan followed the same pattern, about two decades behind Japan. (Most of the world's computer components are currently produced by Korean and Taiwanese companies. Even the stuff that goes into Apple's products.) China is currently in the first stage. The U.S. probably went through the same thing after it broke off from colonial Europe.
I suspect however that there's a third stage - complacency and mediocrity. The U.S. went into this in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped Japanese products to gain a fairly sizeable foothold here. Japan seems to be going through this third stage the last couple decades, allowing Korean and Taiwanese products to eclipse Japanese as considered "best" in the world.
How is it "unrealistic" to expect a steel company to correctly produce steel and accurately describe its properties? Other steel companies seem to manage this without issue.
But as another responder stated, if you are a company you basically cannot trust ANYTHING outsourced these days, and must constantly monitor it for quality. Which begs the question, why outsource then if you must also incur the added cost of verification and riding herd on QA...
I am not knowledgeable about auto part forgings, but for large steel rotor forgings (20-100 tons), there are about 3-5 reputable companies in the world. The equipment to manufacture such forgings costs millions, the knowledge to make such forgings is highly specialized, the cost of making a mistake and remaking the part is huge, and the volume is in the dozens or perhaps 100s of pieces per year (worldwide). It doesn't make sense for any manufacturing company to make such forgings themselves. Not even GE, Mitsubishi, or Toshiba can justify the capital and labor overhead to make such parts in house.
Obviously smaller parts are a different story, but outsourcing does make sense for most raw material forming such as casting and forging.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.