meet them. As a result, reducing rates can increase our workload, but it won’t translate into profits. Without differ-entiation, the competition becomes cost-based, and the outcome of our employees’ hard work can feel unrewarding. To break free from this, we’ve refined our priorities on what our company should do and what kind of work we should engage in, narrowing it down to reach where we are today.— You acquired a company specializing in video and con-tent production in 2021. Was this part of your initiative to create new businesses? — Daiwa Holdings, led by Suzuki Masaya, leads the way in terms of M&A. While we have an image of not limiting our-selves to the converting industry, M&A is not our primary strategic focus. However, considering the present times, we should also keep M&A in mind and add any necessary func-tions to our organization. Even though the subsidiary, PRO-MOTAL, operates in a seemingly unrelated industry, we have high expectations for its valuable insights and perspectives.Enhancing IT infrastructure through external support and talent development— Do you have a focus on improving your internal IT envi-ronment and advancing DX? —Whether or not we have experts in IT and DX design can have a significant effect on the company’s direction. At one point, we actively made efforts to recruit IT talent, but the misalignment between our company’s size and the aspirations of the potential candidates posed difficulties in the hiring process. So, we focused on leveraging external expertise, such as consultants, and nurturing our in-house IT talent. While still limited, we are steadily increasing the number of IT-pro-ficient employees. While the prevailing trend in today’s era is agile devel-opment, which involves continuous improvement during the development process, our industry tends to retain a more traditional approach. Our main focus remains maintaining high quality, and we adhere to the principle of shipping only flawless products. Hence, there is difficulty in creating products while thinking, as well as adopting state-of-the-art methodologies. We had been using the same groupware we first imple-mented, continuing to update it, so we knew it was outdat-ed. An external consultant even said, “You’re about 20 years behind compared to others.”Taking the opportunity to change, about two years ago, we made a complete transition from our previous groupware to “Google Workspace.” (*) While we expected issues and complaints, we went ahead with the implementation, em-bracing a “practice makes perfect” approach.A difficult era for both fresh-graduate and mid-career recruitment— What about talent development and recruitment be-yond IT professionals? —While we strive to hire new graduates every year, there are years when we can and years when we can’t. The situation is difficult. Aichi has a relatively large population, but the abundance of automotive companies and significant wage disparities have led to a chronic labor shortage. We were fortunate to be able to establish the Southern Alps Factory in Iida, Nagano. However, the city has a lim-ited population, and only 300–400 students graduate high school each year. Several schools are potential sources of recruits, but half of their graduates move out of the prefec-ture for further education or other opportunities. After that, only about 100 students remain, and we face tough com-petition with other companies. The situation for mid-career recruitment is equally difficult. We’ve raised our salary levels to gain a competitive edge. Nonetheless, a common thing we hear is that “raising salaries won’t make a difference,” as more candidates seem to prefer jobs with no overtime or night shifts. *A cloud-based business tool provided by Google.— What is the average age of your current employees? —The average age of our employees is exactly 40 years 18
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