20180124
Workers who steep themselves in their work voraciously should be vigilant about their health.
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They are hapless because their new boss is intimidating and disdains his employees.
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Problems abound in our section. We need to contend with many complaints from our customers.
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The new graduate will greatly contribute to our business because he is replete with rudimentary knowledge and is avid about his work.
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There is a concern of acquisition of our company by X Corporation. There is not yet any tangible evidence. Merger and acquisition is a sordid conduct that makes me irate. If it is true, the president of our company will be cajoled to reach an agreement.
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I had only a Hobson's choice about who to choose as my husband. He proved to be scurrilous and rule the roost although he does not earn enough to make ends meet. I am planning to take my husband down a peg.
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The financial conditions of our company were at stake. That's why the president and accounting section made a clandestine accounting processing. Their flagrant activities were publicized by many newspapers and our company faced inexorable criticism by the society. The employees’ effort to develop nice products has gone up in smoke.
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Our boss attributed sales decrease of our products to the paucity of attractive functions, but I think the culprit is egregious quality of the products.
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The data in my computer were lost. The data is very important, and need to be salvaged immediately. Otherwise, it will be pernicious to the progress of our project.
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The procedure of this work is difficult to understand with just texts. Please delineate it with figures and pictures.
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Most cellphone users in Japan choose a flat rate because they tend to use the phones beyond the set limit.
20180120
Standard work procedures shall be created so that anyone can manufacture products with intended functions and quality at any factory at any time.
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Customers are not as knowledgeable about our products as we. Therefore, we need to explain our products to customers fully enough. For example, our explanation shall be understandable enough for the listeners so that they can explain the same contents to their supervisors.
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Even after a quality-assurance organization is established, outflow of defective products may occur for the following reasons:
・Although all the manufacturing processes are designed to be perfect, there are still missing points(<=?).
・Processes are operated smoothly at first. However, as factory workers get more used to the operations, they tend to make mistakes because they lose consciousness.
･After customers have determined the quality level, they sometimes raise it.
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■We must not outflow any defective products to the market. If a defective product is found in a manufacturing process, we need to take the following prompt actions:
- Assign a responsible person. Define actions to take.
- Investigate whether there is another defective product, and where in the process the defective product was found.
- Separate products already inspected from products not yet inspected.
- If any defective product has outflowed into the market, QA Section needs to contact related sections immediately, and to decide and implement countermeasures promptly.
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Most defects occur after design change. After a design of a product is changed, QA Section needs to monitor the quality-control status and to keep records on a daily basis.
High defect ratio may imperil the entire business of our company.
20180112
Their skill level does not reach our expectation. In a nutshell, they are not entitled for promotion this time.
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Admittedly, these countermeasures will be effective. However, they are costly.
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The downside of free market economy is overstated nowadays.
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People over 65 years old outnumbers people under 20 in Japan.
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The most unscrupulous crimes in Japan is phone scam.
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The electric current increase in one of the circuits is at fault for the defect of the product.
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Some people circumvent taxes tactfully.
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The computer virus falsify some functions of personal computers.
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The developers found some program bus in the software, but they looked the other way. ====================================
At the final development stage, such bugs became a big problem.
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The resonance entices the entire circuit to have a high electric current.
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I'm in the market for a house.
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Employees who are strapped for time needs to work at year end.
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No employees who feel apprehensive about their work will not be accepted for a job interview.
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The employment market is so severe that we need to make our utmost to find a decent job.
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His mischievous behavior voided all what we have done to improve the human relationship in our company.
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This device may be subject to harsh conditions. Therefore, tests at severer conditions are conducted in this device.
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My boss always talks to himself at work, and it is abrasive.
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The bad weather condition hampered most workers to commute.
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The company gave an admonishment to an employee who is always late for work.
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The high price setting of the USB memory was a fiasco. It is not sold well.
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The importance of team work cannot be underscored enough.
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An overwhelming percentage of people who come of age participate in an adult ceremonies held by the municipal governments.
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By contrast, a few percentage are not allowed to participate in the place they live because their residential record is registered far away.
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Lamentably, they celebrate the come-of-age day alone.
20180118
People who will have a year-end/beginning vacation are asked not to make circuit modifications just before the vacation. It would be difficult to contact them to ask questions during vacation.
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I came from a frugal company. So, I'm not yet used to the lavish corporate culture of my current company.
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We are inundated with complaints from our customers.
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Japan is falling short of workforce due to the aging society.
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The family lives frugally. They wear frayed clothes.
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The file names in the same folder shall be consistent. Inconsistent names are prohibited.
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It will be a formidable task to put all necessary electric circuits into this limited space of area.
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Toshiba Corporation is undergoing a big adversity because it is on the verge of bankruptcy.
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The test specimen underwent soak in a cold temperature, but the symptom was not replicated. Perseverance is necessary to identify the cause.
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My house was built 50 years ago, and we need to revamp it.
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The merger and acquisition of our company by Western Digital necessitated tons of regrouping and revamping tasks. They have been almost completed, but our company has not yet recovered from the aftermath of the hectic days.
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He will be a manager of Sections 1 and 3 concurrently.
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Whatever he says antagonizes me.
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The turnout of the year-end party was approx. 50 people.
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Bluntly speaking, I am not really happy that our company always tries to meet all the requests from customers. Sometimes we need to claim that it is difficult to heed all their requests.
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Because Chinese companies are emerging, some old-fashioned Japanese companies are destined for profit decline and downsizing.
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All the employees are allowed to drink soft drinks for free. The company is abound for the budget.
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The restaurant is reputable for its exquisite meals.
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The Japanese people's polite behaviors after the Great Earthquake in March 2011 should be lauded.
20180116
Subject: Announcement about IT system maintenance
Dear all in Japan,
Let me inform you of the scheduled maintenance of our Internet system from 7 p.m. July 22, 2017 to 5 a.m. July 23, 2017. This is to enable all of you to use the latest versions of software.
During the maintenance, you cannot use the Internet and e-mail. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
If you encounter any trouble after the maintenance, please let IT section know. The contact phone number is 123-4567.
Best regards,
Deputy IT Manager, Mike Taylor
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Subject: Functions of cell phones
Japan is one of the countries where cellphones with a lot of functions are sold. In North America and Europe, cell phones with less functions are sold. Cell phones sold in Japan has functions such as various ringtones, GPF, WEB, and games. Why? Many people commute by train in Japan while people use cars in North America and Europe. Japanese people do not have a lot to do in train, so they have time to use cell phones.
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Subject: Progress of a project
Let me report about the progress of Project X. We were planning to start working on new design items at the beginning of December. However, we started working on some of the items at the end of November if it is more convenient from design perspectives.
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Subject: Slow progress of a project
The progress of Project Y is slow. We are speeding up the progress, and the slow progress is gradually recovering, but the progress is still 2 weeks behind the schedule.
We have to complete 15 design items, but it is difficult to have all of them done by the deadline. Therefore, we are discussing within our team which items will be completed with priority by the end of this month.
The reason of the slow recovery is that we trusted the designers’ promise that they would complete tasks by the deadline, but they didn’t. We could have assigned other people to this task. We will need to make sure that promises will be kept.
Dec 24
"BlueBottle Coffee" in Shinagawa, Tokyo
If you work or travel around Shinagawa station in Tokyo, I recommend you try visiting “Blue Bottle Coffee” shop.
It is a coffee shop chain based in Oakland, U.S. Its Shinagawa shop opened in November, 2016. It opens from 8:00 to 22:00 every day. It is located just outside Shinagawa station.
It offers only several types of coffee such as hot, cappuccino, and espresso. As for food, only sandwiches are served. There are some cakes, but they are small. The taste and lineup of its coffee are quite similar to those of Starbucks, and the price range is about 10 or 20% more expensive than Starbucks’.
Still, I recommend you visit there. I love Blue Bottle Coffee much much better than any other coffee shop chain in Japan. I cannot wait until it expands its stores all over Japan.
Blue Bottle Coffee creates a good atmosphere. Because of its price range, a little higher than Starbucks’, there are almost no students who study for a few hours with only a cup of coffee. I really feel annoyed at students occupying the seats.
Another good point is that you can look down on commuting people in weekday mornings. Look at this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbvLCZk1xZU (Be careful that you may see a commercial before the video.) This is so called “a commuting march” at Shinagawa station. You can look down on these people from the 2nd floor. It is spectacular even for me. Unfortunately, it is prohibited to take pictures from the shop.
The third thing that I like the shop is that they call customers by their surnames. “XX sama, coffee is ready.” (“Sama” is a very useful expression for Mr. and Ms.) It shows a great respect from the shop to the customer. I feel more relaxed with this attitude.
I tried one of the sweets there. It cost 270 yen despite the small size, but the taste really matched the coffee. The small cake is baked in Japan and is fresh. I admire how enthusiastically they seek for the best combination of coffee and sweets.
You will experience nice service and good taste with only several hundred yen.
■
How to Make Enemies and Lose Influence in the Chip Business
By
Pavel Alpeyev
and
Ian King
Steve Milligan was ready to declare victory. A statement was drafted and a photographer was getting lined up for a hand-shake ceremony planned in Tokyo. As the brash Silicon Valley executive prepared to announce the biggest deal of his career, a prominent Japanese newspaper was reporting his consortium had clinched an agreement to buy Toshiba Corp.’s semiconductor unit, the country’s last big chip business.
Except that they hadn’t. Before Milligan could strike a pose for the cameras, the deal was off. For the chief executive officer of Western Digital Corp., it was the latest misread in a string of them.
When Toshiba put its chip unit on the auction block eight months ago, Milligan’s team seemed to have some advantages over deeper-pocketed rivals. As Toshiba’s partner in the memory business, it had legal leverage that could be used to scare other bidders away. The Japanese conglomerate faced staggering losses from its bankrupt nuclear reactor business and was being pressured by lenders to close a deal quickly.
It would require more than a little diplomacy to win over Toshiba, the banks and Japan’s bureaucrats. Yet the 53-year-old deal maker soon alienated Toshiba executives central to the business.
In the end, private equity firm Bain Capital won the prize, thanks in part to the last-minute intervention of Apple Inc., one of Toshiba’s biggest customers, which helped Bain put together an $18 billion offer. In Japan, money talks just like anywhere else. But there were other considerations.
“With so many stakeholders to please, the deal was always going to be tough and it required more finesse than Western Digital had,” said Damian Thong, a Tokyo-based technology analyst at Macquarie Group Ltd. “This was essentially a high stakes game of poker and Western Digital overplayed its hand.”
The company declined to comment for this story and declined to make Milligan available. Toshiba also declined to comment. This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen people closely involved in the negotiations, who asked not to be identified because the details are private.
Chip Battle Over, Toshiba Must Now Put Legal War to Bed: Gadfly
An accountant by trade, Milligan built his career as a deal maker in the hard disk drive industry, a notoriously cut-throat business that author Clayton Christensen used as the template for his 1997 bestseller, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” a book about how tech companies go bust when they can’t adapt fast enough.
Milligan navigated a difficult route to the top of Western Digital. At one point he left the company, where he was chief financial officer, to take the helm at a troubled rival owned by Japan’s Hitachi Ltd. Then in 2011, he turned around and sold the business to his former employer for almost $5 billion. The deal made Western Digital the industry’s biggest player and Milligan its CEO.
Still, the maneuvering came amid bigger changes that meant hard disk drives would eventually be replaced by semiconductors. Chips were increasingly catching up to the older technology in terms of price and capacity without the downside of having spinning magnetic disks.
Under that pressure, Milligan last year made an even more ambitious move. He spent $16 billion, an amount about equal to Western Digital’s market value then, to buy SanDisk Corp., a semiconductor maker that depended on a longstanding joint venture with Toshiba for its chips. In a sign of how important the deal was to Western Digital’s future, Milligan moved his office to SanDisk’s old headquarters in Milpitas, California.
The buyout gave Western Digital the right to chips manufactured at Toshiba’s plant in Yokkaichi, a massive complex of factories where SanDisk had split some of the cost of machinery over the years. But it wasn’t a marriage of equals. Toshiba had invented the technology, and the Japanese conglomerate owned the land under the Yokkaichi factory, its buildings and almost all of the intellectual property its employees used to make the chips.
“From Toshiba’s point of view, Western Digital was like their younger brother,” said Yukio Sakamoto, a veteran of Japan’s chip industry and former CEO at Elpida Memory Inc., the Tokyo-based semiconductor maker that went bankrupt in 2012. “Imagine your kid brother trying to boss you around. You can see why things got emotional.”
The balance of power shifted last December, though, when Toshiba hit a crisis. Top executives at the parent company announced they’d discovered construction delays and cost overruns at four atomic reactors in the U.S. had led to billions of dollars in losses. To pay its debt, Toshiba had to put its most profitable business, the chip unit, on the auction block.
Why Toshiba Needs Cash Fast and What May Delay It: QuickTake Q&A
With the SanDisk acquisition just completed, Milligan didn’t have the money to do another massive deal, but the prospect of owning Toshiba’s crown jewel was tantalizing.
“It was a once in a lifetime chance to vault into the top ranks of chip players,” said Thong, the Macquarie analyst.
Behind Samsung Electronics Co., Toshiba is the biggest producer of an increasingly essential piece of hardware: flash memory, the chips that replaced film inside cameras and are now key to just about every portable electronic device, including the iPhone. The latest generation of these chips, which can squeeze even more data into a smaller space, will likely help Toshiba and Samsung widen their lead over everyone else -- and eat further into the hard disk drive market.
Yasuo Naruke, left, and Satoshi Tsunakawa, during a news conference in Tokyo in January.
Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg
Tempers first flared at an April meeting at Western Digital’s headquarters, where Milligan sat across from Toshiba’s head of the chip unit, Yasuo Naruke. The American CEO made a low-ball offer of $13 billion for the business and said he’d use his rights as Toshiba’s partner to block a sale to anyone else, according to people who attended the meeting.
With a helmet of dark hair parted neatly on the side, Naruke projects an image of calm restraint, but the 62-year-old engineer fumed the whole way home to Tokyo on the airplane, according to the people. He believed Milligan was trying to take advantage of Toshiba’s problems to buy the chip business on the cheap, they said.
People familiar with the thinking of Western Digital executives say Toshiba was given no ultimatum at the meeting and the $13 billion figure was only a preliminary test of pricing. Milligan only expressed concern the business might be sold to investor groups that included Western Digital’s competitors, his fiduciary responsibility, they said.
“The impression at Toshiba is that they waited until they had the most leverage to make their move,” said Jason McBride, a former Western Digital employee who left before the SanDisk acquisition and now works at Toshiba as senior marketing manager in San Francisco. “It went from ‘it’s all about trust’ to ‘let’s get down in the mud.”’
Over the next months, Milligan escalated his efforts. In May, Western Digital’s lawyers challenged Toshiba in arbitration over its right to sell the business unilaterally and in June they asked a California court for an injunction to block any deal.
Rival bidders received letters threatening lawsuits, according to at least two people who got the missives. A letter from Western Digital to Foxconn Technology Group, an early bidder, said merely reviewing due diligence documents from the chip business might violate Western Digital’s confidentiality agreements with Toshiba, according to a copy obtained by Bloomberg.
By early September, the threats appeared to be paying off. Key investors in a rival consortium led by Bain were scared away. State-backed Innovation Network Corp. of Japan and Development Bank of Japan Corp. wouldn’t sign checks until the lawsuits were resolved, so Japan’s trade ministry shifted its support to Western Digital.
The banks, desperate to get a deal done, also reasoned the quickest way to end the litigation was to let Milligan win, according to several people familiar with the events. Stock exchange rules gave Toshiba until March 2018 to close a sale or risk being delisted.
But as Milligan and his team prepared for victory, Bain wasn’t conceding. The Boston-based private equity firm had competed in dozens of contentious buyout battles over the years, and the presumptive favorite in the Toshiba deal had changed more than once.
In March, Taiwanese electronics maker Foxconn indicated willingness to pay as much as $27 billion, but was ruled out because of its ties to China. In April, chipmaker Broadcom Ltd. had a brief moment in the lead. Then, in June, Bain’s group was named the preferred bidder, with a $19 billion offer that was supposed to include financing from government-backed lenders, who balked.
To fill the void, Bain needed new investors. Early last month, Bain executives led by David Gross-Loh, co-head of the firm’s Asia business, made a trip to Cupertino to lay out a case for Apple CEO Tim Cook. Apple had reason to want someone other than Milligan to succeed: a Samsung-Western Digital duopoly in the flash memory market could raise prices. Apple gave Bain the swing vote it needed.
Eight months of wild negotiations ended last week, when Toshiba finally agreed to sell to a group of investors including Bain, Apple, and Dell Inc. The deal was engineered so that Toshiba and Hoya Corp. will hold a majority of the voting stock, a solution that keeps control of sensitive technology in Japanese hands. The transaction is still subject to regulatory approvals.
Meanwhile Milligan, who just weeks ago seemed poised to win it all, may be left in a worse position than when the jockeying for advantage started late. Not only does the winning investor group include competitors Seagate Technology Plc. and SK Hynix Inc., but the relationship with Toshiba is badly damaged. The Japanese company is building factories that will make the next generation of flash memory and says it may leave Western Digital out. That would leave the company unable to supply customers with the latest technology.
Western Digital is still threatening to use arbitration to try to stop the deal from closing, and the company’s lawyers say litigation could drag on until 2019.
“We intend to continue our successful legal efforts into the binding arbitration process,” John Hueston, counsel for Western Digital and partner at Hueston Hennigan, said in a statement last week.
Toshiba and Bain are confident they will prevail in arbitration, people familiar with the matter said. The agreement calls for the sale to be consummated even if the litigation is unresolved.
So far, Western Digital’s shareholders don’t appear to be terribly concerned. Though the stock fell 3.5 percent on Monday, shares are up 23 percent for the year. Among the 29 Wall Street analysts who cover the company, 24 still recommend investors buy its stock.
Shareholder Charlie Smith, chief investment officer at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh, says he’s confident Western Digital will eventually win in court, but concedes it can’t afford to get locked out of the chip business by an angry partner.
“The disk drive business is a cash generator, but it’s going to be dead in five, six, eight years,” he said. “They would be in a serious bind at that point.”
— With assistance by Yuki Furukawa, and Takako Taniguchi
