Can Brazil's aerospace champion Embraer conquer Asia?

In the sprawling assembly plant of Brazilian jet maker Embraer, a little Japanese sign is pinned on a whiteboard. "Kaizen," it says, a Japanese word for continuous improvement. "We do hundreds of kaizen projects every year to increase productivity in our production sites," said a factory manager, looking out to where a 146-seater E195-E2 is awaiting its wings, engines and a paint job. "Last year, we were able to achieve a 17% reduction [in production lead time] despite all the difficulty we had in the supply chain," he said. The company aims to achieve a 40% reduction by the end of 2023. Kaizen was made famous in Japan by Toyota and others and the scrap of paper pinned up in the factory is emblematic of a Brazilian national champion increasingly open to ideas from outside. Francisco Gomes Neto, Embraer's newish CEO, has come from the auto industry. Embraer now has two U.S. citizens sitting on its board. The broadening of perspective is crucial: The battle for market share rages globally and, according to interviews with executives here, will increasingly be fought in Asia. Embraer predicts its passenger jet production will increase to 60-70 aircraft this year, and eventually back to its prior level of 100-110, after two years dented by the pandemic. But achieving the goal may not be so simple. The company now faces competition from Airbus for larger jets and state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China (COMAC) for smaller ones -- while Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which acquired the regional jet business of Canada's Bombardier in 2020, is pushing its customers to use their existing fleets for as long as possible instead of buying from Embraer.<br/>