Raider Boone
About the article
This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from April 1989.
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He has shocked the Japanese business community into wondering whether Americans might begin to go shopping for companies in Japan just as Japanese have done in the United States.
But the difficulties he encountered suggest that day is still a long way away.
Pickens succeeded in buying a block of shares now worth about 1 billion dollars to edge out Toyota Motor as the largest shareholder in Koito Manufacturing Co., a major auto parts maker. But despite the fact that Pickens has 20.2 percent of shares, the Company's management politely turned down is request. for a seat on the board of directors this week.
"It is necessary to build a trusting relationship first. In Japan, it is not possible to just say, 'I'm a major shareholder' and get a seat on the board right away," Tamotsu Aoyama, a director of Koito, told a news conference.
Pickens, in his first visit to Tokyo, challenged what some analysts consider two central tenets of Japanese business culture -- a company belongs to its employees, not its shareholders; and the Japanese market is for Japanese, not foreigners, to enjoy.
Pickens argued in a speech that protecting shareholders' rights by using corporate buyouts to oust incompetent management helped get the U.S. economy back on its feet in the 1980s.
