Nidec investigators confirm 844 cases of quality misconduct, concentrated in three business units

Nidec's external investigation committee has confirmed 844 cases of quality misconduct across the group, including 60 it classifies as serious and 784 as general, plus six separate cases of improper country-of-origin labeling or customs documentation. The three-member committee, chaired by a lawyer who previously served as chief prosecutor of the Osaka High Public Prosecutors Office, spent from May 13 to September 2, 2026 combing through the fallout from a quality review Nidec launched in January after an earlier accounting-fraud probe raised concerns about internal controls.

The misconduct is not evenly spread. Three business units, NIST, NMOJ and NTMC, account for roughly 90.9% of all confirmed cases, with NIST alone responsible for 585 of the 844. The dominant violation type is mundane but consequential: 805 cases, about 95.4% of the total, involved changing a manufacturing process, material or piece of equipment without the customer's required prior notification or approval. The remainder included 22 cases of falsified or fabricated test results, 11 inspection or manufacturing-condition violations, four instances of shipping off-spec or unapproved products, and two record-keeping violations.

The committee's case studies show how these violations played out on the floor. At a plant under the SPMS unit, workers relaxed internal acceptance standards without customer approval and altered inspection data submitted to a customer for years, even codifying the data-adjustment practice into an internal rule after the problem was identified. A facility under AMEC Organic reworked nonconforming automotive parts without customer sign-off to cut scrap costs, a practice the report says continued over a long period. At NMOJ, a plant used recycled resin banned by customer agreement to cut costs, and did not immediately disclose the substitution to the customer even after employees flagged it internally. NTMC shipped motors after telling a customer that chemical-content requirements were met without actually confirming the necessary supplier data. At NIST, staff recorded standardized pass values for inspections that were never performed and had inspection certificates signed off despite known gaps in testing frequency, a practice that survived a change in production ownership.

The committee's root-cause analysis is the harder-edged part of the report. It found that Nidec's management pushed short-term profit and cost-reduction targets that did not match the operating reality of individual businesses, while the corporate structure needed to govern a group that had grown to 354 companies by September 2025 and 305 production and development sites across 31 countries by June 2026 was never built out to match that scale. Authority stayed concentrated around the founder's micromanagement-based leadership style, limiting the transparency needed to see what was actually happening at individual plants. In a survey of 97,663 employees across 305 sites, which drew a 92.1% response rate, 31.9% of all respondents cited pressure over deadlines, sales, profit or cost-cutting as a cause of the misconduct. The committee stopped short of finding that the founder or other executives directed or knowingly tolerated the specific violations; a forensic review of email data from 31 current and former executives, including the founder, turned up no clear instruction or acknowledgment of misconduct.

Nidec says it has found no material impact on past consolidated financial statements so far and plans to file corrected past securities reports and its report for the year ended March 2026 as early as possible. Personnel sanctions are still to come, based on the facts the committee established, and the company says it is working through customer-by-customer discussions on the affected products. On the structural side, Nidec has revised its global quality assurance rules to give quality assurance heads at each business unit and group company explicit authority to halt shipments, made its quality suggestion hotline permanent, and is reworking reporting lines so quality-compliance information reaches headquarters faster. Whether that authority actually gets used against a cost-cutting push from the top is the question the report leaves open.