Hitachi’s business approach changed from cost reduction to creation of value

Yoshihiko Mogami,
VP & EO,
Hitachi Ltd.

Hitachi has been actively engaged in a wide range of sectors in India, including construction machinery and air conditioning systems, as well as social infrastructure systems, information and telecommunication systems, high functional materials and logistics. Hitachi is expanding its business under the policy that is to contribute to the medium- to long-term development of the Indian society through the Social Innovation Business.

Regarding information and telecommunication systems, Hitachi Data Systems provides best-in-class information technologies, services and solutions that deliver compelling customer return on investment (ROI), unmatched return on assets (ROA) and demonstrable business impact. 

With a vision that IT must be virtualized, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable, Hitachi Data Systems offers solutions that improve IT costs and agility. Its customers trust Hitachi Data Systems to protect their data, the raw resource that lies at the heart of their businesses. 

Yoshihiko Mogami, VP & EO, Hitachi Ltd. expressed his thoughts on the company’s latest initiative in a recent interview with VARINDIA. Excerpts…

Hitachi has recently introduced Social Innovation Initiatives through the effective use of IT in healthcare, agriculture, banking, infrastructure, energy, business management, manufacturing, etc. Please throw some light on it.

As far as healthcare is concerned, we implement Proof of Concept project with NHS GM (National Health Service England Great Manchester. (Improve disease-prevention services.) As for agriculture, we cooperated with Mitsui & Co. Ltd. In precision agriculture, this trial was implemented in Brazil by using satellite image analysis to ascertain growing status. As regards banking, we shipped over 500 ATMs (Automatic Teller Machines) to India.  Hitachi also provides Energy Saving as a Service to North America. This service enables customers to reduce total energy cost.  Hitachi provides one-stop service consulting, system integration, operation and maintenance. Regarding business management, Hitachi has a large number of customers which rank Fortune 500 all over the world.

What is your expansion plans for India specifically? 

Hitachi Group's basic policy in the Indian market is "Contribute to the medium- to long-term development of the Indian society through the “Social Innovation Business". We have three pillars for IT business to achieve this corporate policy. The first is "Leveraging large pool of excellent talents". There are a great number of excellent human resources. Especially in the consulting area, we are planning to double the number of employees of Hitachi Consulting Software Services India.

The second is "working jointly on new business incubation". For example, the Indian Government is going to strengthen the network infrastructure and the related market is expected to grow rapidly. 

We think we can convey our expertise of network and telecommunications we have accumulated in the Japanese and other markets. We are currently holding discussions for collaboration in this field with some Indian companies. 

The last is "strong relationship with Indian partners for the Indian market". We have already built firm relationships with business partners in storage and ATM businesses, and will further strengthen these. Also, we are going to aggressively consider mergers and acquisitions as one option to expand our business and contribute to the Indian society as we have agreed with Prizm recently. 

How Hitachi is utilizing IT for supporting global business operations?

Hitachi is fully utilizing IT to make the business operations more efficient to strengthen the global competitiveness in various fields, such as global supply chain management, global human resources management, global procurement management, etc.

What are Hitachi’s various ongoing and upcoming engagements for channel partners?

Thinking about each market, we implement both direct and indirect channel sales activities. As for more details about India, we cannot disclose yet. We already have a lot of channel partners in India. 

satinder@varindia.com