Japanese-American Joint Restructuring of National Steel Corporation

In 1984, NKK corporation, a leading Japanese steel maker, acquired from the National Intergroup Inc. (NII), an American holding company, its 50% equity interest in National Steel Corporation (NSC), the fourth largest integrated steel firm in the US. In spite of the US economic recovery that began in 1992, NSC continued to operate in deficit and in June 1994 NKK brought in a new management team consisting of six American executives and one Japanese executive. Since the third quarter of 1994, NSC has turned its financial performance around. In this paper, using Bayesian estimation procedures, we estimate the join point or the time at which the productivity of NSC's major production lines experienced an upward shift; if the join point occurs after an appropriate gestation period of the new management team, NSC's recovery may be said to be due to the efforts by the new management team. After confirming that indeed this is the case, we discuss how the management team achieved the turnaround. The organization of the paper is as follows. The next section presents the background. In the third section Bayesian procedures for estimating a join point are presented. In the fourth section we discuss restructuring at NSC and the Japanese Total Quality Control system. Conclusions are given in the final section. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.