"The Strategic Effects of Firm Sizes and Dynamic Capabilities on Overseas Operations: A Case-based Comparison of Toyota and Mitsubishi in Thailand and Australia"

In international business, much attention has been directed to the international expansion of firms based on their use of resources and competitive capabilities that have been built up in a home country to create a competitive advantage over host-country firms. More recently, the organizational capabilities and competitive advantages of Japanese manufacturing firms in general (in autos, electronics, etc.) have been analyzed as important factors in the establishment of overseas transplants. The theoretical framework of the overseas application of home-country management resources has been effective as a basic tool in analyzing the fundamental issue of international operations of the firm. However, the existing models, which tend to emphasize application of country-specific resources, does not sufficiently explain the frequently encountered question of why multinational enterprises (following, MNEs) from the same home country pursue different strategic paths and actions when managing overseas operations. The present paper attempts to incorporate a dynamic and firm-specific perspective and empirically analyze how differences in the financial resources and organizational capabilities of MNEs from the same home country affect the strategy and competitive behavior of their operations in the same local country. The analysis will center on the two Japanese auto assemblers, specifically Toyota Motor Corporation and Mitsubishi Motors Corporation, which have local production facilities in both Australia and Thailand. These two countries provide interesting case studies because in both the local operations experienced a serious crisis in recent years. The crisis for local auto producers in Australia began in the 1980s with the removal of protectionist policies and the rapid liberalization of the auto market. In Thailand, exceedingly severe conditions for local auto assemblers were caused by the 1997 Asian economic crisis. The present paper will focus its attention on the differences in the responses by Toyota and Mitsubishi to these crises, which we characterize as "larger competent firm" and "smaller competent firm" respectively. The two firms in question have both maintained international competitiveness in production in their common home country of Japan, in addition to building top-level local competitiveness in their Australian and Thai operations. However, when faced with a growth opportunity and a subsequent crisis, the responses of the local operations of the firms were markedly different. It is anticipated that behind these differences in firm conduct lie interfirm differences in firm scale (i.e. financial power) and dynamic organizational capabilities (e.g., capability-building capability) in their home country. The present paper will attempt to delineate these interfirm differences and their effects on firm conduct to explain why two firms from the same home country would show such different patterns of conduct even though they face the same local opportunities and crises.

Template-free synthesis and particle size control of mesoporous calcium carbonate

Controlling particle size is important in powder technology. Here we report a scalable production process of mesoporous calcium carbonate with a controllable particle size. We focus on the effect of the aggregation rate on the obtained particles. In this study, we change the particle concentration (1.2–12 mass%) to control the aggregation rate and then obtained particles with relatively narrow range of particle size (310 ± 30–560 ± 100 nm) and nearly identical specific surface areas and particle structures by template-free method. We proposed the aggregation model to describe the formation of meso-porous calcium carbonate

"The Strategic Effects of Firm Sizes and Dynamic Capabilities on Overseas Operations: A Case-based Comparison of Toyota and Mitsubishi in Thailand and Australia" (in Japanese)

In international business, much attention has been directed to the international expansion of firms based on their use of resources and competitive capabilities that have been built up in a home country to create a competitive advantage over host-country firms. More recently, the organizational capabilities and competitive advantages of Japanese manufacturing firms in general (in autos, electronics, etc.) have been analyzed as important factors in the establishment of overseas transplants. The theoretical framework of the overseas application of home-country management resources has been effective as a basic tool in analyzing the fundamental issue of international operations of the firm. However, the existing models, which tend to emphasize application of country-specific resources, does not sufficiently explain the frequently encountered question of why multinational enterprises (following, MNEs) from the same home country pursue different strategic paths and actions when managing overseas operations. The present paper attempts to incorporate a dynamic and firm-specific perspective and empirically analyze how differences in the financial resources and organizational capabilities of MNEs from the same home country affect the strategy and competitive behavior of their operations in the same local country. The analysis will center on the two Japanese auto assemblers, specifically Toyota Motor Corporation and Mitsubishi Motors Corporation, which have local production facilities in both Australia and Thailand. These two countries provide interesting case studies because in both the local operations experienced a serious crisis in recent years. The crisis for local auto producers in Australia began in the 1980s with the removal of protectionist policies and the rapid liberalization of the auto market. In Thailand, exceedingly severe conditions for local auto assemblers were caused by the 1997 Asian economic crisis. The present paper will focus its attention on the differences in the responses by Toyota and Mitsubishi to these crises, which we characterize as "larger competent firm" and "smaller competent firm" respectively. The two firms in question have both maintained international competitiveness in production in their common home country of Japan, in addition to building top-level local competitiveness in their Australian and Thai operations. However, when faced with a growth opportunity and a subsequent crisis, the responses of the local operations of the firms were markedly different. It is anticipated that behind these differences in firm conduct lie interfirm differences in firm scale (i.e. financial power) and dynamic organizational capabilities (e.g., capability-building capability) in their home country. The present paper will attempt to delineate these interfirm differences and their effects on firm conduct to explain why two firms from the same home country would show such different patterns of conduct even though they face the same local opportunities and crises.

Rhodopsin-mediated light-off-induced protein kinase A activation in mouse rod photoreceptor cells

網膜の知られざる光応答を顕微鏡観察で発見 --光センサー細胞が暗黒に反応した--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2020-10-14.Detect with PKAchu. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2020-10-30.Light-induced extrasynaptic dopamine release in the retina reduces adenosine 3′, 5′-cyclic monophosphate (cAMP) in rod photoreceptor cells, which is thought to mediate light-dependent desensitization. However, the fine time course of the cAMP dynamics in rods remains elusive due to technical difficulty. Here, we visualized the spatiotemporal regulation of cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) in mouse rods by two-photon live imaging of retinal explants of PKAchu mice, which express a fluorescent biosensor for PKA. Unexpectedly, in addition to the light-on-induced suppression, we observed prominent light-off-induced PKA activation. This activation required photopic light intensity and was confined to the illuminated rods. The estimated maximum spectral sensitivity of 489 nm and loss of the light-off-induced PKA activation in rod-transducin-knockout retinas strongly suggest the involvement of rhodopsin. In support of this notion, rhodopsin-deficient retinal explants showed only the light-on-induced PKA suppression. Taken together, these results suggest that, upon photopic light stimulation, rhodopsin and dopamine signals are integrated to shape the light-off-induced cAMP production and following PKA activation. This may support the dark adaptation of rods

Isolation of a transcriptionally active element of high copy number retrotransposons in sweetpotato genome

Many plant retrotransposons have been characterized, but only three families (Tnt1, Tto1 and Tos17) have been demonstrated to be transpositionally competent. We followed a novel approach that enabled us to identify an active element of the Ty1-copia retrotransposon family with estimated 400 copies in the sweetpotato genome. DNA sequences of Ty1 -copia reverse transcriptase (RTase) from the sweetpotato genome were analyzed, and a group of retrotransposon copies probably formed by recent transposition events was further analyzed. 3’RACE on callus cDNA amplified transcripts containing long terminal repeats (LTR) of this group. The sequence -specific amplification polymorphism (S-SAP) patterns of the LTR sequence in the genomic DNA were compared between a normal plant and callus lines derived from it. A callus -specific S-SAP product was found into which the retrotransposon detected by the 3’RACE had been transposed apparently during cell culture. We conclude that our approach provides an effective way to identify active elements of retrotransposons with high copy numbers.</p

On the Correspondence between Surface Operators in Argyres-Douglas Theories and Modules of Chiral Algebra

We compute the Schur index of Argyres-Douglas theories of type $(A_{N-1},A_{M-1})$ with surface operators inserted, via the Higgsing prescription proposed by D. Gaiotto, L. Rastelli and S. S. Razamat. These surface operators are obtained by turning on position-dependent vacuum expectation values of operators in a UV theory which can flow to the Argyres-Douglas theories. We focus on two series of $(A_{N-1},A_{M-1})$ theories; one with ${\rm gcd}(N,M)=1$ and the other with $M=N(k-1)$ for an integer $k\geq 2$. For these two series of Argyres-Douglas theories, our results are identical to the characters of non-vacuum modules of the associated 2d chiral algebras, which explicitly confirms a remarkable correspondence recently discovered by C. Cordova, D. Gaiotto and S.-H. Shao.Comment: 18+13 pages, typo corrected in v