Sony to move to London

Fantastic news. In a huge vote of confidence that delighted the City, Sony last week announced that it will shift its financial headquarters from Tokyo to London.

The cold logic of the move was plain. The mighty Japanese electronics maker, which handles £17bn worth of foreign exchange turnover each year, calculated that by getting closer to the centre of the action, it would annually save as much as £40m.

But it was an emotional victory for Britain as well. The City frothed with excited speculation. Jobs would be created, currency trading volumes would rise, and, best of all, Sony's faith in London would blaze a trail for other Japanese companies to follow.

Suddenly all the talk was of which titan from the land of the rising sun would be the first to follow Sony west. Mitsubishi? Toyota? Hitachi? In these tight economic times, almost any major exporter would be able to effect big cost savings by abandoning its ancestral home.

But it simply isn't going to happen.

Sony is, and always has been, a very special conundrum. It is as Japanese as sushi, and shares the quality of being totally global. It manages to be a national standard-bearer even though the things it does, and the way it runs its affairs, set it miles apart from mainstream corporate Japan.

The company's history is littered with examples of its maverick management. It was born amid the ashes of post-war Japan and its founders, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, presided over almost all the key moments of the group's extraordinary growth, from Trinitron TVs to Betamax to the Walkman to CDs to Minidiscs to the PlayStation.

All were events that demanded fundamental challenges to the Japanese way of work. And although the pair steered the company as aggressively as any other Japanese management team, the underlying style was unique. When Sony first started exporting its gadgets to the US in the mid-1950s, it repeatedly found itself fined by customs officials.

The problem lay in the "Made in Japan" labels attached to each machine, which were smaller than regulations allowed. Mr Morita, though fiercely proud of his country, decided that more people would buy his technology if they thought it was American, so the label was made so tiny it was barely legible. The name "Sony" itself was selected for not sounding particularly Japanese.

The strategy was frowned upon in Japan, where no other company would even contemplate such disloyalty, and was abandoned two decades later when Sony realised that "Made in Japan" had become tantamount to a seal of quality.

Sony's management broke countless other Japanese business taboos. It installed a procession of loud-mouthed New York executives to handle its US affairs; it was the first Japanese company to issue American Depository Receipts; and with the purchase of Columbia Pictures and the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, it became the first to launch a determined US asset-grab.

What all this adds up to is that Sony is a company that has always put practical considerations before national pride. As with the move to London, saving money or breaking into some new market has always outweighed its Japanese qualities. It is a company that has remained gloriously aloof from the traditions and practices that have bogged down so many of its compatriots.

Unfortunately for other companies, they could not hope to match Sony even if they wanted to. Sony has established its own flexible, renegade culture through years of effort; it is now too late for anyone else to change. So, sadly, Sony will probably be the first and last big Japanese firm to domicile here.