The benefits of Abenomics may be suspect, but that's not stopping Shiseido from investing in its home country. Asia's biggest beauty company will build a manufacturing plant in Osaka Prefecture—its first plant in Japan in more than 30 years. Shiseido, one of the biggest global beauty manufacturers, will spend about 40 billion yen ($328 million) to build a facility in Ibaraki, located in Osaka Prefecture. Construction is slated to begin in 2018 on a roughly 72,000-sq.-meter plot—twice as large as one occupied by an existing Osaka plant that will shut down as the Ibaraki facility kicks off production in 2020.
The new plant, which will produce high-end offerings, as well as mass-market lotions and moisturizers, will start out with the 900 employees transferring from the Osaka plant. Using two-armed and other advanced robots, the company seeks to raise output by 50% to 100 million units a year without expanding the workforce. According to Shiseido, it takes about a week to deliver items from a domestic plant to drugstores in Japan. By building a distribution facility at the Ibaraki site, the company aims to slash this to a day.
Not to miss out on the boom, Japanese household goods manufacturers are stepping up investment to increase production, according to Nikkei Asian Review. For example, Kao plans to spend an annual 30 billion yen or so over the next two to three years on disposable-diaper factories inside and outside Japan. And Kose will invest about 6 billion yen by 2017 to raise output capacity at a Gunma Prefecture facility by roughly 80%. The site will produce more high-end cosmetics and other offerings. Meanwhile, Lion is stepping up domestic production of midrange to premium toothbrushes, while Kobayashi Pharmaceutical is moving to expand in April its line of adhesive plasters for joint and muscle pain, according to Nikkei Asian Review.
