The conspiracy of Japanese wiring and electronics suppliers to put the screws to Toyota and other customers has now led to the largest antitrust action in history. What we know appears stupendous in scope. To date 20 suppliers have paid fines totaling $1.6 billion in the US (an additional $347 million in fines in Europe and Japan brings the total to $1.95 billion). Some 21 executives have pleaded guilty to felony antitrust charges including jail time and financial penalties. Wired participants, secret locations, coded communication and an expanding list of auto parts and firms, spanning 10 or more years and at least 4 continents. Wild!
...once customers have been screwed for a while, it starts to feel normal
Then there's what we don't know. To date all of those charged have pleaded guilty. As a result, the Department of Justice (and their counterparts in Japan, the EU, Canada, Mexico, Korea and Australia) have not had to enter detailed charges into the public record. With no trial, no evidence need be made public – and even though every corporate law firm in Detroit is racking up billable hours beyond their wildest imagination, those involved have done a truly impressive job of keeping their mouths shut.
And with cause: private lawsuits in the US can seek treble damages, and at least 45 such have been filed (and for now consolidated in the District Court in Detroit). The fines that firms have willingly paid suggest those fines are well below the maximum – though back of the envelope calculations suggests DOJ used a rule of thumb of 8% of revenue for the early wire harness settlements. These and other firms may however have benefitted from the antitrust Amnesty Plus program, which provides for low or even no fines for those who 'fess up' early and help the prosecution. So the amounts could easily hit $5 billion. However, without evidence, such suits will go nowhere, and Federal courts have put a stay on those suits while criminal investigations are ongoing. Attorney General Holder has indicated that the Department of Justice is far from concluding their work; for their part, the Europeans raided six companies this month. But then there are those wiretaps of phones and tapes of meetings: it appears that the DOJ is limiting itself to central players, and going at them with such ironclad cases that they can avoid wasting resources on the morass of a jury trial.
NPR segment …Nine Suppliers Plead Guilty… [mea culpa: they interviewed me]
In some ways, the industry invites conspiracy. The design and engineering process for a new vehicle involves so many components that doing a full start-from-scratch purchase for each part in a vehicle is administratively infeasible; purchasing departments just aren't large enough. So when a Toyota comes out with the next generation Camry or a Ford the next F-150, they will naturally lean towards the incumbent supplier – they know the engineers, they will have the manufacturing capacity. With suppliers involved in the actual design process, they have to be selected before specifications are firm. Yes, the car companies pursue outside bids to try to keep the process honest, and when there is an entirely new component it's a fully competitive bid. Likewise firms with new technology can get their foot in the door – and those are exactly the firms I see as a judge of the Automotive News PACE award competition.
With so many vehicles under development – in the US alone carmakers will launch 365 new vehicles between now and 2015 – it's clear that purchasing departments have fallen down on the job of tracking costs. But these are not the highly engineered items where at present one or two firms control the technology, such as turbos or common rail diesel systems. When I look at a list of the components named in the guilty pleas, they are for the most part not items where new technology is changing the game: starter motors, alternators, seat belts, wire harnesses. While new materials are coming, in the case of harnesses leading to thinner gauges and now even lighter-weight and cost aluminum wires, these products are mature. But this is necessary: you can't readily fix prices when a good isn't a commodity. When you know your and your competitors costs are similar, then you can agree on what the price could be and the level at which your conspiracy can fix it.
Part of the reason is again administrative: car companies with few exceptions have no internal manufacturing capability for the items they procure. They thus rely upon comparisons with past prices, adjusted for changes in the price of materials and known or anticipated productivity improvements. Therein lies the opportunity for a cartel: once suppliers have started screwing their customers, the car companies can come to believe that it's normal. Bids look sensible given past prices. Since harnesses with their miles of wire and hundreds of connectors are one of the most expensive component purchases a car company makes, companies always seek outside bids – but thanks to the conspiracy either find few firms express interest, or come in with ridiculous prices. [For an example see "Ford Alleges…" Automotive News, Aug 5, 2013] This should raise suspicions, but apparently did not set off alarms. While Toyota was firm mentioned in initial guilty pleas, the list of victims now includes most of the industry's major firms. Toyota's purchasing department may have been overwhelmed in its go-go years of the noughts (ending with the early retirement of the firm's top 4 executives), purchasing departments throughout the industry clearly were not up to the task of sniffing out carefully coordinated price fixing.
With wire harnesses, 4 suppliers dominate the Asian market, with Delphi Packard (yes, the name I use is anachronistic) a strong contender elsewhere (and as the one major player not named in this segment, finding that it's suddenly gaining market share in Nagoya). So how did the conspiracy arise? In Japan (as elsewhere) suppliers share panels in engineering conferences and industry associations; ironically, as I found in my own PhD research in the mid-1980s, they may even play golf together at events hosted by their customers. Put them together in the ex-pat supplier community in the US and informal interactions become more likely. Or at least that's my supposition of how things got started, and why it remained undetected in some cases for a full decade.
With stays on the private lawsuits, with uncontested guilty pleas in all the criminal cases, and with those involved so far keeping their lips sealed, few details have come out on the US end. It may be that journalists in Japan can find out more – what goes into the public record may be different, Japan's Freedom of Information Act is stronger than that in the US, and when plied with drinks officials and mid-level auto industry managers may be more willing to speak less-or-more off the record. Journalists and stock analysts should also be asking Toyota about their purchasing operation, about how they could be bamboozled out of so much money and how they're working to fix that. Finally, all should be lauding the Japanese Fair Trade Commission, which in its pursuit of this case is showing that it is more capable than in the past – handling the domestic side of a multinational price-fixing conspiracy – and is willing and able to act in the interest of consumers.
Mike Smitka
