Multiskilled labor management of Japanese commercial vehicle makers in the Chinese market

In the fast-growing Chinese heavy commercial vehicle market, it has been claimed that the rule is “manufacturers cannot survive unless they exceed an annual production scale of 10,000 units.” However, Japanese automakers GAC Hino Motors Company (GHMC) and Qingling Motors have been producing a profit in the Chinese market even though their production scale is less than 10,000 units. This has been due to the adaptation of a Japanese production system that can maintain a constant productivity standard even when dealing with small-scale production. However, the success of this Japanese production system has been due to the development of a method of fostering multiskilled workers in accordance with the actual circumstances in China. a) Musashi University Research Center, 1-26-1 Tamaue, Nerima-ku, Tokyo, Japan, outyuukk@yahoo.co.jp b) Faculty of Business Administration, Kanagawa University, 2946 Tsuchiya, Hiratsuka city, Kanagawa, Japan, suh@kanagawa-u.ac.jp A version of this paper was presented at the ABAS Conference 2020 Autumn (Wang & Suh, 2020). © 2021 Zhongqi Wang and Youngkyo Suh. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 International) license. The CC BY 4.0 license permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Annals of Business Administrative Science 20 (2021) 1–17 http://doi.org/10.7880/abas.0201201a Received: December 1, 2020; accepted: January 8, 2021 Published in advance on J-STAGE: January 17, 2021