Editor’s Top 5 Feature Stories in 2022: Company

On April 1 this year, Panasonic implemented a new company structure and became “Panasonic Holdings Corporation.” The new organization comprises seven operating companies, all of which share the vision of achieving excellence outlined in our Basic Business Philosophy. Panasonic also launched the new brand slogan “Live Your Best” to reaffirm our commitment to enriching people’s lives and well-being and to promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) across our internal organization. 

The following are extracts from our Editor’s Top 5 Feature Stories covering Panasonic as a company published in the Panasonic Global Newsroom this year.

Panasonic Group CEO Yuki Kusumi outlined the Group’s key financial objectives over the next three years, including the achievement of improved cashflow and operating profit. He also talked about the Group’s commitment to protecting the environment and combatting the effects of climate change, evidenced by our ambitious goal of reducing CO₂ emissions by more than 300 million tons by the year 2050.

Kusumi also expressed his determination to create a working environment within the Group that will encourage employees to embrace new challenges, partly through maximizing the use of technology, saying he see this as a key source of competitiveness.

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To underline its focus on sustainability and people’s well-being, Panasonic Holdings announced it expects to spend more than four-fifths of its overall R&D budget in those two areas by 2025. At the beginning of this year, the company launched its ambitious Panasonic GREEN IMPACT initiative, which aims to spur society-wide emission reductions by offering consumers energy-saving products and by supplying energy-saving solutions and renewable energy technologies to its business customers.

The key developments that will help achieve these environmental objectives include a new generation of solar cells and the generation of hydrogen from water in a commercially viable manner.

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On July 28, Panasonic Group announced its financial results for the first quarter of FY2023. These showed a healthy 10% increase in sales across the Group, driven partly by a strong level of automotive battery sales; they also revealed a decline in profitability driven by various external factors, including COVID-related lockdowns around the world and hikes in the cost of raw materials. 

The announcement included details of how the Group’s seven operating companies are accelerating the implementation of initiatives to enhance their competitiveness. There was no change to the overall profit forecast for the full fiscal year.

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As a truly global company, Panasonic has always valued diversity of thought and today welcomes employees with diverse backgrounds, outlooks and opinions. To secure insights from across the company on the topics of diversity, equity and inclusion, the company conducted an exhaustive global employee survey in 2021. 

The Group subsequently utilized the feedback from the survey to shape its own Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Policy. To maintain the momentum generated by the survey and the publication of its findings, Panasonic employee representatives from five countries and regions came together at a global meeting in July 2022 to share their best practices.

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At Panasonic, employees are encouraged to proactively seek opportunities to make a positive impact on the environment. In April this year, the company announced a new brand slogan, “Live Your Best,” supported by a TV commercial filmed on a set decorated with thousands of flowers. 

After filming was finished, a Panasonic employee suggested that instead of the flowers being discarded, they could be upcycled by extracting pigment from their petals and using this as dye for clothing products. This led to a collaboration with ECOALF, the environmentally conscious European clothing and accessories brand, whose vision is to create recycled products of the same quality as the best non-recycled products.

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