CEO Yuki Kusumi said Panasonic Holdings’ managers should experience more of a “sense of crisis” given the company’s low profitability and will be judged accordingly.
“If they don’t produce results, they need to be replaced,” Kusumi said in a recent interview. “The reason they don’t produce results is the lack of a sense of crisis.”
Those are unusually strong words in Japan, and particularly at Panasonic, where the idea of lifetime employment has been embraced for years. Two months ago, Kusumi warned in a strategy briefing that the Osaka-based electronics maker was falling behind on its profitability targets and that it would reduce the number of “troubled companies” to zero by March 2027.
