The meeting room Fumio Ohtsubo uses when visiting Tokyo from his Osaka base has a Panasonic television and DVD player in the corner, portable Panasonic telephones, a Panasonic air purifier, Panasonic lights and Panasonic air conditioning. Yet the room itself is traditional. Japanese ceramics sit, a little uneasily, alongside French post-impressionists, and the building shows no signs of corporate flashiness.
It sums up the company well: an electronics manufacturer of formidable scope, but traditional and with a miserly eye on costs.
Panasonic is also a manufacturer much troubled by the global economic downturn – last year it lost Y379bn – but one that, under the leadership of Mr Ohtsubo and his predecessor Kunio Nakamura, has gone further than many of its rivals towards solving the strategic problems that face Japan's electronics industry.