A Tinseltown Odd Couple : Entertainment: If Matsushita buys MCA, two very different companies will have to mesh two very different styles. This isn’t like Sony and CBS Records.

Most Japanese greet each other by saying “ genki desu ka ?”--which roughly means, “are you feeling healthy?” But in Osaka, headquarters of giant Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., businessmen traditionally ask, “ moh kete imasu ka? “--”are you making any money?”

This bottom-line attitude, experts say, has rubbed off in spades on Matsushita, which last week disclosed that it is pursuing acquisition talks with U.S. entertainment giant MCA Inc. If ever a Japanese company were preoccupied with financial success, it is Matsushita, by far Japan’s largest consumer electronics company.

But now that it may follow archrival Sony Corp. into Hollywood and acquire entertainment programming to complement its audio and video equipment business, many experts wonder if Matsushita’s management style can work amid the glitter of Tinseltown.

“What’s going to happen with Matsushita, when some guy in a T-shirt walks over to them and says, ‘Let’s do lunch,’?” said Bob Gerson, editor of TWICE, a New York-based consumer electronics trade publication. “That’s not the way they like to do business.”

Although Matsushita’s old-fashioned ways might clash with Hollywood’s free-wheeling style, its no-nonsense, profit-driven approach has served it well for most of its 73 years--including nearly two decades of manufacturing consumer electronics goods in the United States.

The company rolled up worldwide profit of $1.6 billion on sales of $44 billion for the year ended March 31, an impressive showing in the low-margin Japanese consumer electronics industry. But it’s still not much on all those sales, and that’s where MCA might fit in. Its movies, records and other entertainment ventures have much higher profit margins.

Acquiring MCA would be a different twist for a company that has systematically grown without acquisitions.

“Matsushita’s intention has traditionally been to grow internally,” said Yukuo Takenaka, chief executive of his own Los Angeles-based investment banking firm.

Concentrating first on the Japanese domestic market, Matsushita built a huge network of more than 20,000 retailers who help give the company unmatched clout in marketing and distributing many types of consumer electronics products.

Matsushita, which has become a global electronics giant by exercising stern control of operations from Osaka, is rapidly increasing its North American manufacturing capacity.

Matsushita’s 16 North American plants produce mostly color television sets and microwave ovens under the trade names Panasonic, Quasar, Technics and National. The plants, which employ about 11,000 workers, are as highly automated as their Japanese counterparts.

Matsushita has become so adept at manufacturing efficiency that several of its assembly-line innovations, such as a speedy circuit board insertion device, are used by competitors, according to David Lachenbruch, editorial director of Television Digest.

In addition to the goals of greater efficiency and making money, Matsushita is equally concerned with preserving tradition and protocol.

Matsushita’s company song is broadcast each morning in its Japanese facilities as well as to about 2,200 employees at its U.S. headquarters in Secaucus, N.J. Preserving Japanese tradition is virtually paramount: It wasn’t until last year that Matsushita decided to appoint an American to head its U.S. operations.

After Richard A. Kraft, 61, was named president and chief operating officer of Matsushita Electric Corp. of America, the company announced that it planned to implement its own version of a “local content” rule to assuage critics who contended that the company did not invest enough in the United States. Kraft said his company would purchase 70% of all the parts for Matsushita products produced in North America from local companies. Previously Matsushita had purchased about 40% of its parts from North American suppliers.

Nevertheless, a former U.S. trade official who met recently with several Matsushita officials said the firm keeps a tight reign on its global operations and is among the most highly centralized companies in Japan.

“So much takes place in Osaka that the Americans and Japanese who aren’t based there are out of the loop,” the former U.S. official said. But the official said the centralization at Matsushita has led to a “a pretty arrogant attitude; there’s a certain high-handedness in terms of the (high) pricing of their product” in Japan.

Matsushita may keep prices high in Japan, but it has been cited with selling its products artificially cheaply in the United States.

In 1984, a federal court reinstated a U.S. International Trade Commission ruling that imposed a higher duty on Japanese television sets. The ITC imposed the duty after finding that U.S. television manufacturers were being threatened “with material injury” by the artificially low prices charged by Matsushita and other Japanese manufacturers.

In more recent years, Matsushita has been cited for dumping memory chips that are used in electronic products. And the company is contesting charges by U.S. cellular telephone producers and makers of flat-screen video displays that it is dumping those products also.

Undercutting the competition’s prices to steal market share from rivals has long been a hallmark of many Japanese companies. But Matsushita has been among the most ruthless in using the tactic, wrote business consultants James C. Abegglen and George Stalk Jr. in their book “Kaisha--The Japanese Corporation.”

“If in the pursuit of market share Japanese companies find that they must make certain capital or expense investments to hold or gain share, the investments are made with little regard for the short-term returns of the project,” the authors say. They contend that Matsushita has a history of selling its products in overseas markets at artificially low prices.

Despite its manufacturing prowess, Matsushita “continues to struggle in its attempt to evolve from a consumer electronics giant into a viable competitor in the information and communications field,” the London investment house Barclays de Zoete Wedd Research Ltd. observed in a March, 1990, report on Matsushita.

“Although the firm now boasts a 50/50 consumer versus nonconsumer sales ratio, the effect at the bottom line is minimal, as consumer products no longer provide much profit and non-consumer products (such as business phone systems, computers and semiconductors) are not yet picking up the slack,” the investment firm said.

Such stagnation is heresy in profit-oriented Osaka, where managers are asked each day if they are making any money.

Nonetheless, Matsushita seems determined to improve on the marriage of entertainment “software” and video and audio “hardware” that Sony has pursued through its acquisitions of such companies as CBS Records and Columbia Pictures.

Said James I. Magid, senior securities adviser at New York-based Needham & Co: “Sony has put together the full media array. It seems natural to expect that Matsushita will do the same thing.”

BRAND NAMES Panasonic Technics Quasar National MATSUSHITA’S REVENUE SOURCES WORLDWIDE 1989 Audio Equipment 9% Electronic Components 13% Home Appliances 13% Communications and Industrial Equipment 23% Video and TV 27% Other 155