President Tsuga Spoke at the 17th Nikkei Global Management Forum

- Challenging the Unknown Future by Learning from Anyone and Anything with an Untrapped Mind -

Tokyo, Japan - The 17th Nikkei Global Management Forum was held on November 10 and 11 in Tokyo. President Tsuga took to the stage at the opening session on the 10th to address the audience and also took part in discussions.

The Nikkei Global Management Forum is an international conference that brings together representatives of the world's most accomplished companies to discuss corporate strategies, management philosophy, and recent management trends. Since its inauguration in 1999, many global leaders have taken part in this event, which has come to be recognized as one of Asia's most distinguished events. The theme of this year's forum organized by Nikkei Inc., IMD, and the Harvard Business School was "Resilient Leadership - Making the Next Leap Forward," and it welcomed 1,100 people over the 2 days.

President Tsuga took the stage at the opening session organized on the first day and spoke about "Our Challenges of Contributions toward the Future." He introduced the initiatives he has implemented since he took office 3 years ago.

Presentation overview

"Simple" and "speedy" reform

When I took the helm, I tried to keep in mind the following 2 points:

We improved many areas of the company from these 2 perspectives. And by sharing a sense of crisis with employees, the entire company worked as one to focus on management that placed "profits," which is a form of compensation we receive for the "contributions" we make to our customers, first and foremost and this is how our business managed to recover. I believe we are where we are today because we prioritized our goals and tackled them one by one.

Growth strategy based on "customer needs" and "multiplication"

By introducing a new direction - "we can unleash potential for the future" - within 6 months of taking office, we were able to instill confidence in both our internal and external stakeholders. Moreover, in order to share our values with people across the world, we developed a new brand slogan, "A Better Life, A Better World." We believe the "A" is very important. This means that we want to make contributions to each and every customer, and this is the key to success, an approach that well suits Panasonic.

Then we looked at in which fields we should grow and make "contributions" and chose the "automotive" and "housing" industry, as according to our customer needs, they had the most potential for growth. We are focusing on growth in these 2 business areas as well as in home electronics, BtoB solutions, and devices. To succeed in these 5 business areas, we established 4 key companies that unite different business divisions, and they are forging strong ties with key customers to provide value as a single contact window, as one unified Panasonic group. And by multiplying the expertise and technological prowess of individual business divisions, the source of Panasonic's competitive clout, with the strengths of other divisions or external partners, we are bringing to life new innovation and provide new services. We have witnessed the birth of numerous Cross Value Innovations from these efforts.

Furthermore, it is important to look at growth in terms of regions. By creating a "5 x 3 matrix" by multiplying the 5 businesses with "Japan," "Americas/Europe" and "Strategic Regions," we have developed and implemented specific growth strategies to further accelerate our growth.

Closing

I cherish the words, "Challenging the unknown future by learning from anyone and anything with an untrapped mind." This is a combination of words our founder valued and thought were essential to management an "untrapped mind" and "learning from anyone and anything" and the words, "challenging the unknown future," that is based on my personal experience. I have a research and development background, and in that world, there are hardly any events that can be foreseen. Rather, we find it challenging to tackle the unknown. This can be said of management. By taking on a new challenge, we can create an unknown future and make the most "contributions" to our customers.