About Yoshinori Hirai
Yoshinori Hirai, President and CEO of AGC, has been promoting the company’s participation in CES 2025, where AGC plans to showcase solutions in next-generation mobility, semiconductors, and energy. In a video message, Hirai stated that “material evolution is the foundation of innovation” and that “without high-quality materials, innovation slows down.” He highlighted AGC’s historical role in developing an alternative to CFCs in the 1980s and its current work in automotive glass, EUV mask blanks, and hydrogen-related technologies.
In interviews, Hirai has discussed AGC’s “ambidextrous management” approach, which he described as having existing businesses support new ventures while keeping new projects “light asset” to avoid excessive costs. He attributed Japan’s “lost 30 years” to a post-bubble focus on cost-cutting rather than pursuing new growth, and said that viewing wages as a cost rather than an investment suppressed innovation. Hirai noted that AGC has raised wages by over 6% for two consecutive years and plans to continue, linking this to investment in talent. He also reflected on his own early career, saying that an initial business failure taught him that “good technology alone does not guarantee business success” and that a customer perspective is essential. Hirai added that he has made a personal rule to never assume something is impossible, stating, “the moment you think it’s impossible, you are 100% not going to succeed.”
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Yoshinori Hirai's recent appearances.
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Transcript (9 segments)
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Yoshinori Hirai0:04
I've decided that whenever I take on something, I will absolutely never allow myself to think from the start that it can't be done or that it's impossible. The moment you think something is impossible, you're 100% not going to succeed. Most things — if you try a hundred ventures, maybe only one will actually turn into a real business. So in a world where quitting is the norm, stopping something is never a failure — it's a lesson. You've learned that something had a low probability of success. If you think about it positively, what remains are things with a higher success rate, and you just decide to bet on those. No matter what difficulties come, no matter how tough the situation gets, I've decided to enjoy it. The tougher it gets, the more of a challenge there is, so I want to enjoy everything. If you don't enjoy it — since you spend more than half your life working — it would be unbearable.
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Interviewer1:37
When you were CTO, it was more about planting seeds, and now as CEO, it's about deciding what to strongly pursue and what to stop — the nature of decision-making is quite different, I imagine. Since becoming CEO, it's been about two years now, right? You've probably faced many situations. Could you tell us about a decision that really made your heart race?
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Yoshinori Hirai2:07
When I was CTO, rather than focusing on R&D, I was more involved in launching new ventures, so I made various decisions and there was definitely thrill involved. The one that stands out most is the bio-pharmaceutical CDMO — the contract development and manufacturing business. I made that decision in 2016. At the time, the entire company's business scale in that area was only a few billion yen, but I decided to invest more than ten times that amount in M&A. It has now grown into a 130 billion yen business.
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Interviewer2:49
I actually happened to be at that advisory board meeting when it was discussed. At the time, I was quite skeptical from the outside — wondering what would become of it. There's also quite a lot of competition in that space, isn't there? And now it's reached that kind of scale — the profit impact is enormous, isn't it?
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Yoshinori Hirai3:12
That's right.
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Interviewer3:13
Looking back now, I can finally appreciate how remarkable that was. Could you tell us how you came to make that decision?
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Yoshinori Hirai3:22
At the time, contract development and manufacturing organizations — CDMOs — were not that common. In most cases, pharmaceutical companies handled development, manufacturing, and sales entirely in-house. But as drug development became increasingly difficult, pharmaceutical companies began concentrating on development and obtaining regulatory approval for sales, while outsourcing manufacturing. This trend was already emerging in semiconductors around that time. I saw that the same trend would apply to pharmaceuticals, so I decided to make a big bet on the CDMO business. Even though the industries of semiconductors and pharmaceuticals are completely different, the underlying logic is remarkably similar.
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Interviewer4:25
Yes, that's exactly right. As a business leader today, are there principles you follow — things you've decided you will not do?
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Yoshinori Hirai4:41
Not so much as CEO, but as a personal principle — whenever I take on something, I've decided I will absolutely never allow myself to think from the start that it can't be done or that it's impossible. The moment you think something is impossible, you're 100% not going to succeed. So that's something I've truly committed to in my heart.
