Good Risks: Discovering the Secrets to ORIX's 50 Years of Success

Chapter 9 China, a Learning Experience

Toward the end of our dinner at Beacon I mentioned to Tominaga-san that I was looking forward to meeting Mr. Liu, the chairman of ORIX’s Chinese operations. He smiled and pointed at Oishi-san. “PR department,” he said in heavily accented English. I asked Oishi if she knew anything about my interview, and she said she did not but she would make inquiries the next day.

True to her word, I received a polite email the following day from the head of the PR department (with a CC to several people whose names I didn’t know, but also to Oishi-san). He said simply that Mr. Liu Guoping was expecting to meet me at the company’s head office in Hamamatsucho on Thursday afternoon that week. I barely had a day to get my China prep notes in order before it was time to go meet the man in charge of developing China for this expanding financial group.

I was well aware that China was the biggest gap in my research on the ORIX Group. Everyone knows that China is now the second-largest economy in the world and hoping to be number one. For years, it was viewed mostly as a cheap manufacturing base, yet it is now seen as the world’s biggest marketplace. From reading the Annual Report and other research, I knew that ORIX has been active in China for decades. Tominaga had explained to me how the company set up its very first overseas office in Hong Kong back in 1971, when the parent firm was only seven years old. I knew that ORIX had begun operations on the mainland ...