Abstract:

Firm’s relationship is one of the important issues in the field of corporate management. In this paper, the authors review networks within the automotive industry, focusing on Nissan. Applying measures of social network analysis, the authors calculate the centrality index of data on transaction and cross shareholdings in the Keiretsu of Nissan’s network to discover the strength of correlation between them. Centrality index are calculated based upon “degree”, “betweenness” and “closeness” indicators. And the central firm, periphery firm and radius and diameter of the keiretsu are measured using graph theory. Compared with the result of earlier studies on Toyota, extremely weak correlation between transaction and cross shareholdings in the Keiretsu of Nissan have been found. Implications of the findings are discussed.