CSSO Yamanishi (hereinafter Yamanishi)
After serving as Vice President, LSI and Electronic Component Procurement Division, Procurement Unit and General Manager of the Global Supply Chain Division, I assumed my current position last year, which is also closely involved with sustainability. This year, which marks the 90th anniversary of our founding, we are working toward our 2030 vision of becoming a technology company that achieves net positivity with digital services, through materiality.
COO, CRO Onishi (hereinafter Onishi)
We are leading the expansion of business with our clients across the globe while bolstering the governance of our front organization. The front organization is comprised of a large number of salespeople, and the human element has always been an important factor. However, we will continue here to reform our management with the power of digital technology while incorporating the insights of data-driven management, and change our salespeople's behavior by enhancing their own accountability, leadership, and other human skills, thereby maximizing the value transformation we provide to our clients and, as a result, our earnings as well.
EVP Global Solutions Otsuka (hereafter Otsuka)
I began my career in sales, and since 2023 I have been engaged with the Fujitsu Uvance venture, where I am responsible for creating new businesses. Fujitsu Uvance is a business that takes a cross-industry approach to social issues and provides digital services that contribute to client growth. We are promoting the formation of an ecosystem focused on solving social issues with the aim of achieving a sustainable world. We are proactively introducing Fujitsu's practical knowledge, including the ESG Management Platform and Uvance Wayfinders, to our clients while pursuing our initiatives.
Mr. Takenaka, Daikin (hereafter Takenaka)
As our business has been established for over 100 years, our business operates in more than 170 countries with more than 80% overseas employees of 100,000 employees, and we achieve 85% the total sales overseas. We have developed our factories based on the market-oriented production (note: a production strategy for producing products where there is market demand), in meanwhile, we figure out that diversity with global viewpoint become a management issue. Our Group Management Philosophy shows our commitment to solving social issues and contributing to sustainability, which is one of the fundamental management concepts to support further growth and development in the future. The key is DX initiatives that fully utilize digital technology and data in order to contribute to the environment and society while accelerating customers’ value creation. It is vital to visualize invisible air to provide the value of air as well as to advance the sustainability management. We are discussing not only how to disclose non-financial information, but also how to visualize the competitiveness of ESG activities and contribution to the society. “How to utilize data for management transformation?” I think that there is a need to change the existing process of business management and key indicators. As a leading company of air conditioning and HVAC systems, I believe that we should collaborate across industries by sharing and integrating ESG data.
Meiji University, Dr. Miwa (hereinafter Miwa)
The concept of impact (value creation for society as a whole, including companies) can be broadly divided into two perspectives. The first is sustainable management centred on the disclosure of risks and opportunities based on the TCFD (Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures). The second is the visualisation of the positive impact of corporate activities on society and the environment. The former involves disclosing risks and opportunities arising from external factors such as the global environment and political events, which falls under the single materiality disclosure category. Today, the disclosure of such information is mandatory in annual securities reports, and listed companies are working to disclose it. However, investors are more concerned about how sustainability initiatives relate to their business and how they are linked to value creation. Going forward, companies will be expected to visualize the positive social and environmental impact generated by their business activities, rather than merely disclosing risks.
This constitutes the latter perspective of impact.
Japanese companies are proactively disclosing their ESG and materiality information, but the key issue is whether their strategies and state of progress can be applied to effective corporate assessments. Visualizing the impact using a logic model, such as how much impact a company has the potential to create, how it will increase revenue and corporate value in the process, what are the key drivers and specific measures to achieve this, and how feasible they are, will ultimately prove more persuasive. Since investors evaluate companies in relative terms, usefulness, rigor, and feasibility of non-financial impact disclosures are essential criteria. Disclosures that are logically structured, evidence-based, and linked to measurable outcomes will carry greater persuasive power and become increasingly central to strategic corporate evaluations.
