Message from the President February.2018

One of the year’s first international fairs of home electronics is CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, United States.

The previous CES, which was held in 2017, was about “connecting” and drew attention by triggering efforts to connect business enterprises, products and technologies with one another for providing new added value. The CES in 2018 went a step further: We saw the creation of infinite value that would originate from a state of connection, that is, cooperation among multiple companies, not a single company’s effort, in offering new services. While our perspective may be based on safety, joy or convenience among many other things, many representative companies of different fields honestly pursue what would make users feel happy. How will the world change as a consequence? I will be thrilled to find out.

Meanwhile, it is becoming harder to see the positioning and target users of different companies. A company that has focused on B to C may change the focus of its business operations to B to B, and vice versa. A company changes its business portfolio quickly and flexibly in order to survive. For this reason, it may no longer be possible to simply classify roles in accordance with the conventional perspective of B to B or B to C.

These days, we often see and hear the word, “platformer.” A platformer is a player who utilizes an enormous amount of data that would be an origin of added value, in creating innovative products and services. Currently, the auto industry extends over broad areas. Numerous global companies cooperate or compete in the industry, aiming to be the first “platformer” of a mobility service to lead the evolution of cars in the next generation.

A decade later, our society and companies may have evolved faster than we could have imagined. I am looking forward to seeing it very much. On the other hand, I also consider it to be a threat. A decade later, automation and systematization will have made dramatic progress in our society. AI will have gone through repeated stages of machine learning and achieved self-evolution. Some experts predict that nearly 50% of currently available jobs will be replaced by robots or AI. This is why humans need to gain more knowledge and act accordingly so that we can pursue and create tangible and intangible products and services from a user’s perspective.

I expect each one of the engineers at Meitec to sincerely approach their design and development activities, always based on the perspective of users and the market. Instead of just following the manual, choose and utilize the necessary pieces from the abundant information and think, make decisions and act by yourself. This is exactly the added value of Meitec’s engineers, and is what our clients want from them.