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Message from the President Dec.2009

Lesson For the Future

This year, we are facing the crisis since the company started. Although we are still in this crisis, as we look back the past year, there are things that we can see only in a crisis. In order to not forget the things we experienced and relate it to the future, I would like to note a few things here as a lesson for the future.

When things are going so well, we or company might think it is ordinary things, or might think overconfident that it is one’s real ability. In a long period of time, there is good time and bad time for any industry. It is one’s nature to hope that the good time will continue. But we should not forget that there is time not good for us.

It is not true that we never learned such lesson in past. As I have been saying, our company stand now because of the lesson we learned when the bubble economy ruptured in 90’s. For example, one of the lessons was that “we should operate with our own cash”. What we have learned then, while we were facing a possibility of bankruptcy, was that no financial institutions would help us when a company is in crisis. While the company is suffering from the deficits, all employees are facing the difficult time as well. But the company is still able to continue its business because we are operating without debts. Another example is in our educational and training system. As nearly 2000 engineers are now in group educational and training, the educational and training program can be conducted now because we have build up over 1000 internal lecturers. This is a result of our efforts to construct education system in order to build “stronger professional engineer group” during the normal time. Some of our competitors were not able to conduct such training programs because they could not prepare the lecturers as we did. So, if we weren’t prepared during the normal time, we could have faced the same difficulties.

There were many measures implemented during past normal years as a result of what we have learned from the previous bubble rupture. And these measures are now holding our company. But we should realize that we now facing the crisis that will require additional measures. This recession might trigger a structural change to the world economy. It also might be an event for the Japanese economy and society to change. From now on during this crisis, how will we, as a company and individual, change could be important.

Now, how do we have to change? As we can not see how the world economy will change, we are not certain how the environment surrounding company and people would change. But we know it is important for us to not fear changing ourselves. In our company, we should not have to change our company principle of “co-existence and prosperity”. Or rather, I feel that it might become more important as next level goal. But we might have to largely change the methodology of how we achieve it.
Let us face the coming New Year without fear for change and not loose what we have to protect.

December, 2009