Konosuke Matsushita; Japan Industrialist, Billionaire

Konosuke Matsushita, one of the nation’s greatest entrepreneurs and richest men, a giant in the business world often compared to Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and dubbed a “god of business management,” died Thursday.

Matsushita, who built a consumer electronics empire out of a tiny light bulb workshop, died of pneumonia at a hospital bearing his name in Moriguchi, a suburb of Osaka. He was 94.

Matsushita founded Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the world’s largest consumer electronics firm and the core of a conglomerate with annual sales exceeding $41 billion. The company’s products are exported under the Panasonic, National, Technics and Quasar brand names.

In a survey of Japan’s billionaires published last fall by Nikkei Business Publications Co., Matsushita ranked first, with personal assets estimated at $2.9 billion.

He had humble origins, however. His landlord father went bankrupt speculating on rice, and he quit elementary school and left his native village in Wakayama Prefecture at the age of 9 to become an apprentice at a company making hand warmers in the burgeoning industrial city of Osaka.

In 1918, at age 23, he started his own company, employing his wife and brother in a rented house making light bulbs. The firm, then known as Matsushita Denki Kigu Seisakusho, prospered after developing a popular double socket for its bulbs.

The postwar Allied occupation authorities broke up his business, along with other zaibatsu-- large industrial groups--but he rebuilt it.

The Matsushita business group has about 40,000 employees worldwide. Matsushita retired as chairman in 1983 but maintained an active interest in operations as an adviser until his health deteriorated recently.

Matsushita was revered by the Japanese business community for his prowess as a salesman and his charisma as an inspirational corporate manager. He established the PHP Institute after the war to propagate his philosophy of “peace and happiness through prosperity,” and his was the first major corporation in Japan to introduce the five-day workweek.

“I respected him as the most advanced business manager in Japan,” Eishiro Saito, chairman of the Federation of Economic Organizations, or Keidanren, and honorary chairman of Nippon Steel Corp., said Thursday.

Japanese television showed somber lines of the company’s employees bowing and clasping their palms as a bus carrying Matsushita’s body passed corporate headquarters in Osaka.