Kobe Steel Blames Plant Managers for Quality Control Scandal
TOKYO — When a roll of aluminum produced at a Kobe Steel factory fell short of customers’ exacting demands for qualities like strength, plant managers were supposed to make a painful
but necessary decision: Start again and make a new, better roll of metal, even if it cost the company time and money.
The report by the Japanese steel maker represents its first public accounting of the causes of a data falsification scandal
that has shaken the company and prompted around 500 of its customers around the world — including manufacturers of cars, trains and aircraft — to scramble to verify the safety of their products.
“As long as the revenue was coming in, management wasn’t interested.”
Mr. Kawasaki said the practice of misrepresenting not-quite-perfect metals was at least a decade old but that, because records going back further than
that were incomplete, it may have been going on longer.
The report, produced by Kobe Steel without input from regulators or other outside parties, concluded
that the company had erred by elevating the pursuit of short-term profit over the maintenance of scrupulous quality standards.
But for at least a decade, according to an internal company report released on Friday, those managers
took an easier way out, manipulating test data on some products to avoid expensive do-overs.
