How Olympus Became Japan's Biggest Fraud

In this video we go over the accounting fraud case of the Japanese company Olympus.

0:00 - 2:00 intro
2:01 - 5:24 1990s trading loss
5:25 - 7:11 The coverup
7:12 - 9:15 The Gyrus acquisition
9:16 - 12:13 Michael Woodford
12:14 Japan’s business culture



#Wallstreetmillennial #japan #fraud

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Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0
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[brnbwild]

I worked for a Japanese Company (Mitsubishi) for 3 years as a VP of R&D. It was the most frustrating job I ever held. All information from Japan was filtered through low level "yes men" and took days to get simple answers. It was the only job I ever held where I 'burned a bridge." I simply faxed my resignation to one of the "low level" minions in Japan at 5PM and never returned. They begged me to come back but their way of business was too restrictive.

[stuntmonkey]

I worked for one of Olympus Medical's vendors just around that time. We saw some rather dubious spending from them... not particular shady in it's own right but a willingness to spend money on things that had no immediate or practical impact. The funny thing is that even after they were exposed they still commissioned another one of those go-nowhere projects with us.

[rajr]

Don't know why YouTube brought me here. Zero knowledge on the subject of corporate economics, but surprised how I missed this news of the fraud in a global leader in medical devices (related to my profession). Thanks for the informative presentation.

[TripImmigration]

I'm working in Japan and this is 100% accurate. Even for lower levels, Japanese companies only try to put foreigner in higher position just to be " piranha's cow" where the foreigner will be target as the problem.

[michaelstone]

If you're a foreigner and a Japanese company offers you a position as a COO or CEO don't do it.

[barrbudo]

Olympus is a major name in non-destructive testing equipment. All of a sudden, a different name was attached to the brand, which looked weird because leaders usually don't just leave. I wrote it off as being an expensive takeover from a company that badly needed to enter the market, but then I looked up an Olympus camera and voilà! The brand name was gone! It's thanks to this video that I now know what really happened.

[richardshiggins]

Michael was set up to be the 'Gaijin' fall guy and expected to commit sepuko honourably on behalf of the company . Ghosn was probably allowed to escape in his suitcase for if he had been put on trial in Japan he would have brought the whole Japanese board down with him .

[Masood]

So basically, companies nearly always go down because of management's greed, financial dealings. Never because of staff, products or services.

[TeachinTV]

I've owned two Olympus point-and-shoot and one SLR and I loved them. Never had a problem with them and I really thought the optics, the lenses, were superb. Sorry to hear about the demise of another once-great company.

[paulmakinson]

The strength of Japan is the tradition of beautiful craftsmanship, perfectionism, attention to detail.
Their weakness is their obsession with hierarchy. It is strictly based on reverence for elders and stifles young creative minds. If you see your superior or elder doing something wrong, you are expected to shut up.
An ageing population, low birth rate and very little immigration will unfortunately damage Japan's economy.

[shaonian]

He was lucky to get out in time, look what happened to Carlos Ghosn.

[NanashiCAST]

this is basically what all those yakuza family ran companies end up devolving into

atleast the actual engineers and technicians who made the amazing cameras moved on mostly unscathed

Bunch of companies here still have trouble flexing their expertise and realising their potential because of this toxic "family-like" company culture. And for Japanese, it's usually less a sense of genuin loyalty but more of like warring states period type of forced pressured social and economic consequences gaslit into something resembling loyalty.

But from what I've been hearing, This isn't exclusive to our Japanese companies.

[jackyshin]

This happened back in 2011, like 12 years ago. This was a huge corporate scandal in Japan but pretty average compared to western companies in the Europe and US...Enron and WorldCom and HSBC are far worse.

[neanda]

In the 90s, I had an Olympus OM10, it was one of the best consumer SLR's, analog, at the time. My photography teacher had one at the time too. (btw, I don't think digital cameras were a thing in the 90s, as you said, tech and storage wasn't at that stage).
I feel sad though, as I did love that camera, still do though, wherever it is now

[johnhermanson]

As an ex-employee of Olympus in the US, it was known that the camera division never did really well and was carried by the success of their medical division.

[RandomTrinidadian]

Not every day you hear about a "CEO" with integraty

Takes some real balls to do what Woodford did

[Zen_Power]

Well done Woodford. Integrity in your work.

It does make it worthwhile to follow due diligence when accepting high profile jobs without any question.

[theweboffudge]

Good job, Mr Woodford. You chose to blow the whistle instead of making good money.

[griffithtvr]

Olympus sells cameras for huge prices that have nice exteriors but the specification of cameras 10 times cheaper, only snobs with too much money buy them.

[alanoffer]

I wonder how many days into his two week stint as CEO of Olympus did Woodford realise his dream job of a lifetime was turning into a nightmare .