Takiguchi

As part of its new Medium-term Business Plan, the Company has defined three strategic business fields. Can you explain in more detail what each of these fields is like?

Fujiwara

We have defined ICT, mobility and healthcare as the company's three priority business fields as these are the fields that can effectively tap into our strength from the existing businesses and where society will have greater needs for more innovations in coming years.
In the ICT field, the market continues to expand along with technological evolutions, and there are many opportunities for our technology to play a meaningful role in this field. Our focus will be to create materials to be used in power semiconductors that are in high demand for energy efficiency improvement use cases and other cutting-edge semiconductors for AI and similar uses. In the mobility field, where battery components in electric vehicles must be highly heat resistant and need to provide excellent electrical insulation properties, our Group has technological advantages with its portfolio of phenolic molding compounds and polycarbonate materials. We are optimistic that the automotive market still has good potential of further growth in the future. In the healthcare field, we are keenly interested in minimally invasive therapies. For older patients, surgeries that involve significant pain and trauma have become more difficult. For example, abdominal surgery and laparoscopic, or keyhole, surgery are significantly different in terms of the degree of physical impact. We are confident that our uniquely valuable stents and catheters can significantly contribute to providing the least traumatic therapies to patients. We also have an ongoing research project to study BMI (Brain Machine Interface) devices.

Takiguchi

Successful outcomes of your projects in the healthcare field will definitely lead to quality-of-life improvements. I think there will be a great amount of needs for your upcoming technologies in Japan and other developed countries where the population is rapidly aging. What kind of vision for the future do you have in pursuing the BMI project?

Fujiwara

BMI is a technology that enables directly linking a person's brain to an external machine to allow conveyance of information based on their thoughts. Our ultimate goal in our BWI work is to establish an ability to know what a person who is bed-ridden or has speech difficulty is thinking by having the person wear our device and reading their brain waves. A distant dream, for sure, but this is where we are aiming.

Takiguchi

People say that we are now in an era of VUCA-volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. When you have a business portfolio consisting of these three different fields, it will be less likely that all of the three are seriously damaged at the same time by some volatility/uncertainty factor, right?

Fujiwara

Yes, exactly. It's been 40 years since I joined this company, but I have never experienced a situation where all of the three fields went down at the same time.

Takiguchi

I heard that some of your projects are closely linked with your “One Sumibe” Activities. Can you explain a little about that?

Fujiwara

Our “One Sumibe” Activities include all kinds of activities that connect different teams and departments in the Company to work together to offer integrative solutions to our customers. Every year, we identify a number of priority customers as One Sumibe targets and drive corporate-wide involvement to serve them. Previously, the way we interact with a customer used to be vertical where each department or team talks with the customer on its own. The One Sumibe Activities help us by horizontally connecting all these previously isolated commitments into one. As a company grows in scale, it will be faced with more multi-dimensional, complex sets of needs or requirements from customers that cannot be addressed by a single team or department. We can fulfill such customer needs by having the whole Group organization work as one to offer comprehensive solutions. For example, the One Sumibe Activities have led to a private exhibition at a customer site or a joint study on new themes with multiple teams and departments involved. They have proved to maximize the unique strengths that our Group can offer.

Takiguchi

That will accelerate horizontal collaboration between different departments across your organization while also empowering individual members to perform at their best in their own ways. I think that is a truly valuable initiative.

Fujiwara

I heard that a group of our people is even planning an event called “Sumibe Wine Tasting Meeting” to enhance interactions among employees. A wine tasting meeting probably does not directly relate to our business, but I love this corporate climate that accepts somebody with the concept and idea of having a wine tasting meeting. Such a bottom-up spirit is crucial if we want to maintain vigor and energy in the organization. I am happy that young people readily come up with new ideas that liven up the company.

Takiguchi

As the president, what do you think is important to encourage a bottom-up spirit in the organization?

Fujiwara

Ultimately, the most important decisions of the organization must be made in a top-down manner. But, recallingas a line from a popular TV drama, “the incidents are happening in the field”. If I lock myself in the president's office, I will not be able to see anything about how the company is doing and will not be able to offer any useful recommendations. I want to empower all of our employees working in the field to have a robust ability to plan and propose what they want to try. If somebody in the field comes up to me and says “I want to bring this project to life. Can you help me do that by providing this and this?”, I will be totally happy to offer anything I can to help that person actually achieve that. I want us to shift aeay from a style where ideas are always pushed down on teams from the top.
It is also important for people to be brave and not to be afraid of failures. Great success cannot come from a single attempt, and a few failures will not make the whole organization go under. I want people to propose and take action on their own initiative, and if they fail, they should fail gracefully with dignity. But they need to take everything they learned to feed the next attempt. I believe that a company can become more creative and innovative by building a corporate climate embracing this kind of courageous risk-taking.

Takiguchi

People often say that the Japanese culture is especially averse to potential of failures and risks, but I think people can be brave and more adventurous if they are told that “it is OK to fail”. While many companies are now struggling with serious worker shortage, I think your company's “One Sumibe” Activities and the effort to nurture a lively, pioneering corporate culture will definitely help your employees to want to stay longer and work happily.

Fujiwara

We are in an era where everybody, even absolute newbies, is keen to know what their own value in the market is. Ideally, I want every employee to stay with the Company as long as possible, preferably until retirement, but that kind of thinking may be outdated now. In any case, the company is where they spend most of their time. I want everybody to work as happily as possible and have a great time as long as they are a member of the Company.