Yoshitake Matsumoto, President, Japan

September started with a business trip to Kyushu. This is an appliance product promotion activity built by a solution partner in Fukuoka Prefecture and Stratus. We filmed an interview-style video explaining how Stratus’ ztC Edge and partner company’s manufacturing instruction application products can contribute to solving customer issues.

The yen has depreciated for the first time in 24 years, but when the yen depreciated last time in 1998, I was assigned to the United States. When the yen depreciated in 1998, the transfer amount was about 3/4 of the amount when I was assigned to the United States. There is debate as to whether the depreciation of the yen is good or bad. The demerit of the depreciation of the yen is the burden on households, but it also has a significant impact on business-to-business transactions. The corporate goods price index in April this year grew by about 10.0% year-on-year.

The first quarter of our fiscal year 2023 is three months from March to the end of May. By the time this blog is published, our results are almost final. Looking at the current business progress in the four regions of the world, the boom in business in the U.S. stands out. In Japan, while the economic situation is unpredictable, semiconductor-related and automobile-related investments seem to be firm.

Since Japan Stratus Technology starts in March, in the middle of March, all employees held an event online to share their aims and policies for the new year. This year, we are committed to focusing on measures to respect diversity and education to build professional careers.

The term digital transformation was first used by Swedish university professor Eric Stoltermann in a 2004 paper. What was proposed was that “the penetration of IT will change people’s lives for the better in all aspects.”

The other day, I had the opportunity to talk with Kyoko Iwasaki, a gold medalist at the Barcelona Olympics. Mr. Iwasaki stayed in California for about a year for coach training. He said there was a big difference in the way children are coaching in Japan and the United States.

I think that the new ztC Edge 200i/250i has been announced when you read this blog. Taking this opportunity, we have conducted interviews with several media outlets. Did you see it in various media?

When I became a member of society, I got a job at a company whose core business was the electronic measuring equipment business, so there were many terms related to measurement in the company. I, myself was in a somewhat minor business computer department, but I had experience using the BASIC language to process data from instruments and accumulate it in a file, and to create programs that output the results of analysis to plotters.

We would like to create innovation and promote digital transformation in Japan, regardless of the current status quo bias.

The momentum for digital transformation in industry, society and government is increasing. Recently, there is a proposal by the Japanese government to establish a digital agency, but I think there is a sense of crisis that Japan is lagging behind the trend of global digital transformation.