Japanese firm keeps workers intact

More and more companies especially from the manufacturing sector are now experiencing a slowdown in sales and production volume as orders from their major clientele abroad continue to decline.

Enomoto Philippines Manufacturing, Inc. Cebu Operations general manager Mizorogi Mitsuhito told The Freeman that indeed the current global economic crisis is taking toll on the business operations of manufacturing companies such as their firm which supplies high precision tools in major industries such as electronics, semiconductors, and the auto industry.

Mitsuhito said that since August of last year until November their production started to slowdown and for the start of this year, they have noted lower sales compared to that of last year considering that their major clientele are also under deep slowdown.

So, instead of their usual 24-hour operations, they have cut their working operations to 16 hours to save on costs and for this month of February, their management decided to temporarily stop operations every Saturdays of this month to control their expenses as orders continue to dwindle.

Mitsuhito explained that as their major clients continue to experience slowdown of sales and operations, their operations too continue to plunge down.

“If our customers experience downtrend in their sales, profits and operations, we too experience the same thing. If they have declined 30 percent, we declined by 50 percent,” he said.

He said that the orders for their connectors which are widely used in car parts, production of DVDs, TVs and cellphones are also going down and a huge percentage of this decline is attributed in the auto sector which is deep under slowdown this year.

However, despite the negative impacts of the economic crisis to their business operations, Mitsuhito continue to hold off plans of retrenching their workers unlike other manufacturing companies based in the economic zones in Mactan which have laid-off a number of workers.

“Doing this kind of job requires high technical skills that are learned for three to five years and it is not easy to just cut these people out so as much as possible we do not want to come up with that kind of decision,” he said.

Currently Enomoto’s Cebu operations have 110 skilled staff in their high precision tooling plant and 30 people in their stamping plant, who continue to learn and improve their skills from Japanese consultants commissioned by the company to increase their bottom line.

“Since we are not busy at the moment, it’s high time for us to take the chance to enhance the skills of our people so when things get better, we can be at our best,” said Mitsuhito.

However, he said that if the situation continue to worsen until April of this year they could possibly resort to cutting down the number of their employees; but currently, they implement lesser over times, no Saturday work, and shifting of working hours to compensate the low volume of orders.