Biography|Masamichi Kogai — The Shareholders Meeting That Made Him President

People remember the Skyactiv years as a design story.

The man the board put in charge on 25 June 2013 had spent his career in plants.

Mazda announced the change on 9 May 2013, days after reporting its first annual profit in five years.

Takashi Yamanouchi, president since the Ford unravelling of 2008, would stay as chairman.

Kogai, then 58 and already a director over production and purchasing, would take president and CEO after the 147th general shareholders meeting.

The meeting and the board session that followed were held at this Fuchu headquarters.

Nikkei and the company's own officer notice both fix the effective date as 25 June 2013.

He was the production officer behind the company's monozukuri cost work and the factory rollout of Skyactiv hardware.

The net profit for the year to 31 March 2013 was 34.3 billion yen.

Five years later, on 26 June 2018, the 152nd meeting in the head-office auditorium moved him to chairman and gave the presidency to Akira Marumoto.

The building in the photograph is the later head-office block, shot in June 2020.

It is the same compound as the 1977 gate, not the same facade.

The title on the nameplate changed twice in five years.

The ground under it did not.

Photo: Taisyo, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons