Isegoria

Japan: Here, Kid, Take The Wheel notes that Japan’s car-makers are facing a demographic crisis, because there are fewer and fewer young people to buy cars:

People over 65 now account for more than 20% of the population, vs. 15% in 1997. Meanwhile, the share of those aged 20-29 will likely fall below 12% this year, compared with 15% a decade ago. That means some 4 million people of prime auto-buying age have been replaced by pensioners, who are less likely to buy cars—and, as they get older, less able to drive them.

The young generation also sees cars as an expensive waste rather than a sign of success, so car-makers are trying hard to excite them:

Toyota Motor Corp. says it’s trying to create cars that give customers more wakuwaku, or excitement (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/7/07, “Toyota, Take the Wheel”). Toyota’s latest Prius ads feature cartoon characters originally drawn by Osamu Tezuka, the father of anime. Nissan, meanwhile, has gone into the music business, and in January formed its own record label with Warner Music Group Corp. Winding Road, a song featured in a Nissan ad, has been downloaded 2 million times and is on a compilation CD that has sold 400,000 copies. And in June, Nissan launched a model, the Dualis, with a spot showing the vehicle transforming into an animated robot to leap over traffic.

Young women have become a prime target for the carmakers. In January, Nissan began selling a kawaii — or “cute” — version of its Pino minicar, featuring hubcaps shaped like snowflakes and an owner’s manual drawn in a manga style. And Hello Kitty is now a “Happy Drive Ambassador” for Mitsubishi Motor Corp. The character makes cameo appearances in ads, and last summer Mitsubishi sold a $17,000 limited-edition “Princess Kitty” version of the i minicar that featured Hello Kitty-shaped headrests.

Knock Knock, It’s Your Big Mac:

All told, McDonald’s delivers in some 25 cities, with a half-dozen more on deck. The company just launched deliveries in Taipei, with 1,000 drivers, is expanding Shanghai to citywide service this summer, and is testing the concept in Beirut and Riyadh. In Egypt, where the setup was pioneered in 1995, deliveries now account for 27% of all McDonald’s revenue and up to 80% at some restaurants. Globally, delivery sales are expected to total more than $110 million in 2007, up from $90 million last year, the company says. While that’s spare change for the $21.6 billion giant, the business is growing by 20% to 30% annually, more than triple the chain’s overall rate.

It’s profitable, too. Delivery margins usually top the 13% to 14% that McDonald’s outlets generally yield. That’s because the courier fee, which runs from 50 cents to $1, covers the cost of handling phoned-in orders and the fleets of drivers and motorbikes.

Don’t expect to get your burger delivered here though:

One place, though, that the Golden Arches won’t come knocking is the U.S. The delivery model works well in congested cities where there’s no affordable space for drive-through windows, but plenty of cheap labor to ferry the food to customers.

Fortune had a number of questions for John Mackey, head of Whole Foods, but this one hit home for me:

We’ve heard that some people go after real estate in neighborhoods where a Whole Foods is slated to open. Have you studied your impact on the real estate market?

We haven’t commissioned any studies, but I understand that when we opened in Chelsea [in New York City], condos above the store went up 10% in price on the first day. I can look out my window in Austin, where we have our flagship store, and people are building condos all around. The joke is that we could have made a lot more money just buying up real estate around our stores and developing it than we could make selling groceries. That’s one reason we have a lot of landlords aggressively [trying] to get us in as tenants. In Miami and Sarasota, for example, we will have condos built nearby as part of a mixed-use project.

Fortune‘s senior editor, Alex Taylor III, calls Porsche the mouse that roared, because of what the tiny company’s CEO, Wendelin Wiedeking, has pulled off:

Appointed CEO in 1993 as a 41-year-old wunderkind at a time Porsche was weak — Toyota was sniffing around, and output had cratered to 15,000 cars a year — Wiedeking used his production expertise to turn it around. Now Porsche earns more money per car than any other carmaker (as much as $9,000). No wonder Wiedeking, 54, has been mentioned as a candidate for nearly every top automotive job in Germany.

But all the talk halted in September 2005, when he used $3.6 billion of Porsche’s excess cash to buy 18.6% of Volkswagen. Porsche has since increased its stake to 30.9% (worth $19 billion) and is now VW’s leading shareholder.

The difference in scale, style, and profitability between the two companies is breathtaking. VW is the fourth-largest auto manufacturer (after Toyota, GM, and Ford). Last year it employed 325,000 workers to make 5.7 million vehicles. Porsche is the 34th-biggest auto company; its 11,384 employees produced 102,602 vehicles in fiscal 2006. Porsche’s buying into VW in a big way just didn’t look right, and many car guys were dubious. As one analyst put it at the time, “The mouse dances with the elephant.”

But in the 22 months since the mouse asked the elephant to the ball, the match looks like one made in heaven. Porsche’s stock has climbed almost 200%, and VW’s has more than doubled.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

Given his track record, Wiedeking might be expected to have a free hand in shaping VW’s future. He does not. There is a second party to this transaction: Ferdinand Piëch, CEO of VW from 1993 to 2002, current chairman of its supervisory board, and a man with his own convictions about how VW should be run. Oh, and he’s the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, who designed the first Volkswagen Beetle, and the nephew of Ferry Porsche, who founded the sports car company that bears his name. The Porsche and Piëch families control 100% of Porsche’s voting stock. That makes Piëch Wiedeking’s boss.