Japan's 'Management God' Kazuo Inamori, Honorary Chairman of Kyocera, Passes Away

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[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunwoo Lee] Kazuo Inamori, the honorary chairman of Kyocera who founded the Kyocera Group and grew it into a global company, and who was known as Japan's "God of Management" for rebuilding the bankrupt Japan Airlines (JAL), has passed away at the age of 90.

On the 30th, Kyocera announced that Chairman Inamori passed away from old age on the 24th at his home in Kyoto. Known as a living god of management, he graduated from Kagoshima Prefectural University’s Faculty of Engineering and founded Kyoto Ceramic (now Kyocera) in 1959 at the age of 27 with a capital of 3 million yen. Since then, Kyocera has grown into a major electronics and information equipment company with about 80,000 employees and sales of 1.84 trillion yen (approximately 17.9 trillion KRW) last year.

He was famous for introducing "Amoeba Management" to grow the company. This management method reorganizes the company into small groups (amoebas) of fewer than 10 people, each aiming to maximize hourly profitability. The hourly profitability targets are set monthly and annually, and real-time monitoring by division was used to reduce working hours and increase sales.

In 1984, he entered the telecommunications business, which was monopolized by NTT, and established Daini Denden (DDI), a long-distance telephone company that later became KDDI, Japan’s second-largest mobile carrier.

In 2010, just before turning 80, when JAL went bankrupt due to reckless management and the impact of the US financial crisis, he accepted the request of the then Democratic Party government and took the position of chairman without pay. He carried out restructuring by cutting international routes by 40% and domestic routes by 30%, focusing on deficit routes, and drastically reducing the workforce from 48,000 to 32,000. Within less than three years of his appointment, JAL returned to profitability and was relisted on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2012.

Chairman Inamori had ties to Korea as well, having married Asako, the fourth daughter of the world-renowned horticultural geneticist Dr. Woo Jang-choon, and they had three daughters. When Park Ji-sung joined Kyoto Purple Sanga in the Japanese J-League in 2000, Kyocera was the main sponsor of the team.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.