In 1964, Orient Leasing Co., Ltd., was established as a specialist in leasing with investments from 3 trading companies and 5 banks such as Nichimen and Sanwa Bank. In the days when very few in Japan knew what a leasing business was, it started with only 13 employees, loaned by the investing companies. Approximately 50 years later, ORIX Corporation has grown to become a representative multilateral financial service company in Japan with 187 consolidated subsidiaries.
Retrospectively, the company’s history was far from smooth sailing and a continuous series of ordeals. Many difficult problems and regulatory barriers one after another stood in its way, such as shifting its sales policy from being dependent on the parent companies to selling directly to customers, exploring new financial sources other than loans from banks, and meeting the successive appearance of competitors for new businesses. Without giving up or compromising, ORIX ambitiously faced up to those problems relying on its ‘customer-orientation, sense of independence and spirit of team work’ and finally achieved the success it enjoys today. It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Yoshihiko Miyauchi was always at the center of the company’s challenges.
Born in 1935 in Kobe and graduating from Kwansei Gakuin University, Mr. Miyauchi obtained an MBA in the U.S., which, in those days, was quite rare. After his return to Japan, he joined Nichimen Jitsugyo and then took part in establishing Orient Leasing Co., Ltd., as a staff on loan from Nichimen Jitsugyo. Soon after that, he went to study the know-how of the leasing business at US Leasing (a U.S. company), and, using the knowledge thus gained, he laid the foundations of the leasing business in Japan. After his appointment as the president of ORIX in 1980, he actively promoted the diversification of the company’s businesses to the credit, trust, real estate and life insurance sectors as well as to overseas. Now ORIX has 1,193 operational bases in Japan and 266 overseas.
Though his abundant knowledge of corporate governance, so completely different from the traditional Japanese-style management, and his will to push through regulatory reforms may seem conspicuous or even spectacular, Mr. Miyauchi does not hesitate to describe himself as timid and always filled with a sense of crisis. His motto is ‘Act, but prudently.’ His ideas are bold and innovative, but his acts prudently only after he made sure of the risks involved with his own eyes. His sense of independence, that no one, even a country, cannot be absolutely relied on, derives from his intense experience at the end of WWII, when he was 10 years old, as well as from the teachings of Christianity. |
