Message from the President Mar.2010

In order to grow under the changing market and management environments, the industries must always seek for new business or new products. It is a natural thing to say even without bringing up the concept of Creative Deconstruction advocated by Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist. Especially in the manufacturing industries who are our main customers, when they stop developing new products or new business, it might result in reduction of their business. In order to avoid such situations, although the economy is still severe, we have begun to see some movement in research and development for new products and business at the manufacturing industries. But whether such movement would expand largely or would be brought back to the level in normal economic condition is not certain and unpredictable.

On the other hand, if we are to think about what would be the new business for our company. I think there are two types of new business. One is the company creating a business which would substitute the current core business, temporary engineer staffing, and the other is new business for each engineers.

As the company’s new business, we have been challenging according to the policy of expanding our business field around our core business, engineer staffing, as planned in mid to long term business plan such as the Global Vision 21 and the True Global Vision 21. Today, because of the current crisis, we have frozen the business expansion strategy. And instead, we are trying to preserve our business by restructuring the group businesses. Even under such circumstance, we are trying to continue the global business some how because we have to be prepared for the further expansion of globalization in world economy. Reason for our effort in continuing the job placement business specializes in engineer is that we believe the labor market would be further flexible even though the revision of worker dispatch law may impose more restrictions. We also would like to continue the engineering solution business as a important tool to improve the value of our services toward our customers and improve the corporate value.

New business for each engineer can be described in the way of how each person think about their career. Career advancement of Meitec engineer is directly related to the trend in Japanese manufacturing industries. If the industries are making linier advancement, career advancement of engineer could be said that it is linier. On the other hand, if the industries are in non-continuous mode, engineers have to correspond to it as well. Therefore, if we are to correspond the status of career advancement to the business status, we can say that liner career advancement would be “advancement and expansion of business”, and the non-liner career advancement could be said that it is the “challenge to the new business”.

Whether we can cope with non continuous change would be most important thing under changing current and future world economy and society. When I met an executive in charge of technology at famous automotive part manufacture, he said that “Although most of our engineers are mechanical engineers, I am asking all of them to become electrical engineers as well. And it is possible”. Under non-continuous condition, there may be a situation where you have to start from zero in totally none experienced field. We are now facing a time which we need to consider a possibilities of one particular field of engineering may disappear as we wait for the field to become busy again. If our surrounding is non-continuous, we should advance in non-continuous manner.