by Takuya Hirano, President and CEO, Microsoft Japan
I offer my greetings to all of our stakeholders and am delighted to say that in May 2016, Microsoft Japan is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its launch of business activities here in the country. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all of our customers and partners in Japan, without whose support and patronage we would never have come this far.
Microsoft Japan was established in February 1986 as Microsoft’s Japanese subsidiary under the name “Microsoft Co., Ltd.”, and launched activities in May of the same year. At the time we had just 18 employees, but thanks to everyone’s support, we have grown to become a company with a workforce of about 2,400 people. In 2011, we celebrated our 25th anniversary, changed our name to “Microsoft Japan”, and moved our head office to our current location in Shinagawa with the aim of contributing even more to Japanese society as a trusted enterprise with deep roots in the country.
Over the past five years, we have raised the pace of our investment in the Japanese market considerably. Our many initiatives during this period include opening domestic datacenters in East and West Japan to provide public cloud services, working with many other companies to hold Telework Week as part of efforts to transform work styles and inject greater diversity, and promoting cyber security measures to create a more secure ICT environment.
Microsoft continues to drive digital transformation around the world under our new mission statement to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” We are also freeing ourselves from earlier approaches and habits in our corporate culture to drive further growth by instilling a growth mindset in each and every one of our employees and encouraging them to take the initiative.
Looking ahead, we will help fuel the digital transformation of our customers and partners in Japan over the next 5-10 years through leveraging the latest devices and intelligent cloud services that drive the latest technological advances in IoT, AI, machine learning and other areas, while at the same time intensifying our support for customer “workstyle innovation” and “cyber security measures”, both areas in which we have long focused resources.
To mark the occasion of our 30th anniversary, we have created a “30th anniversary logo”. This logo expresses our gratitude toward our customers, partners, past and present employees, and Japanese society as a whole for helping us to get to where we are today; and our determination to achieve the vision we have for our company as Microsoft’s Japanese arm. This logo was chosen from over 600 design ideas gleaned through crowdsourcing by employee voting and other processes. We will be using it in a wide range of corporate activities, so I am sure that it will continue to catch your eye.
We at Microsoft Japan will continue to do our utmost to support the country’s digital transformation and work as one to contribute to Japanese society as a trusted company rooted in the fabric of Japan.
I take this opportunity to ask all of our stakeholders for their continued guidance and encouragement.
