Business Summit 2020 - Adachi Masayuki, President & COO, Horiba, ltd.

Well, you know, HORIBA's instruments—we have five business segments. The first one is automotive, and mainly we measure the exhaust emission for the environment. And the second one is a processing environment, measuring again the exhaust from power plants or petroleum plants, or air and water quality. And the third segment is medical, measuring the hematology—blood cells and the blood condition of your health. And we have a semiconductor segment which is providing measurement and control for semiconductor manufacturing. And the last one, but not the least, is a scientific segment which is providing R&D research analytical instrumentation for academia. So recently, the energy and the environment is really being focused by all this discussion about the environment and climate change and everything. And also the semiconductor industry is actually getting very busy now because of this pandemic—remote working and all these things are actually accelerating the same kind of business now.

Well, the history of HORIBA's automotive business is directly related to the protection of the environment, because we measure the exhaust emission. So we have been working on combustion analysis mainly. However, as you know, needless to say, this internal combustion engine is kind of being replaced by electrification—EVs with the battery. And also probably in the near future we will have more utilization of hydrogen fuel using a fuel cell on the vehicle. So we have been working mainly on the analysis of combustion engines, but now we are adding our capability to measure and control motor and battery and also the fuel cell system. That's the biggest change.

Well, actually our customers are already global. We are doing business closely—70% of our automotive business is outside of Japan. And so we don't really see too much difference in Japan domestic against non-Japanese companies. They are doing pretty much the same thing.

Well, because we are using our French office as the window for the African market. And we have a significant operation in the medical segment in Montpellier, France. That's probably the geographical reason why about three quarters of our business in Africa is actually medical business—setting up blood cell counters and analysis instruments.

Well, although we are headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, we are pretty much globalized in our size. Very much globalized. For example, the nationality distribution of the company—we have less than 40% Japanese. In other words, Japanese is already a minority. And the French people are actually the second biggest headcount in our group. And so our competition is already global, and we are competing with the frontline technology and the frontline customers. That's probably the key to maintaining our global positioning. If we were just a Japanese company competing with only the Japanese companies, probably looking at the entire group, it's not going to make us a global player. But since we are a global player, I think that's the reason why we can maintain our positioning in a global field.