Message from the President Feb.2013

Every year, from October to beginning of the following year, I make visits to the management people of our clients, and discuss about various matters.

Such visits to the clients in various industries are chances for us to learn what are considered as issues by those management people and how they are confronting them. And I would like to share this information with our engineers as much as possible. You can see them in my internal blog, but I would like to share some of them here.

One issue is the depreciation trend of the yen. Since after the Lehman Shock, appreciation of the yen had continued. But from the end of 2012, yen is moving toward depreciation. If I am to summarize their honest reaction about this, they are feeling that excessive appreciation of the yen is not good but they do not simply think that the depreciation of the yen is good. Reason for this is that, as reported in media, most of these clients are raising their percentage of overseas procurement of parts and materials in order to hedge the exchange rate and reduce costs. It also means that Japanese manufacturers are enhancing their ability to respond to the fluctuation of the exchange rate, and also the work of those manufacturers has been outflowed to the overseas.

I also often hear that these manufacturers are focusing on their high manufacturing technologies as well as the ability to develop products in order to strengthen differentiation of their products so that their products will not to be copied by manufactures of the emerging countries such as China. Today, any products are reverse engineered and imitation or copy products are quickly circulated. In order to prevent this, manufactures think that they need to differentiate their manufacturing technologies so that it can not be easily analyzed by taking them apart.

There are many other macroscopic activities by the clients. So, I would like us to together think about how we can reflect such movement to Metiec Business.