Mitsui : New Year Message 2017

The following 'New Year Message 2017' was addressed to all officers and employees by President Tatsuo Yasunaga.

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Happy New Year, everyone.

I hope you have recharged your batteries over the New Year holiday and are full of enthusiasm for the year ahead. I'm sure 2017 will again be busy for us all. But I'm also sure that together we can make it a very productive and rewarding year, so today I want to touch on two key themes to guide our activities in the months ahead.

Change or lose relevance

The global changes in 2016 show very clearly that if we remain stuck in the past we will eventually lose relevance as the world changes around us.

With this in mind, I want to focus on two things:

• ensuring a strong resurgence by Mitsui & Company, and
• undertaking business reform to achieve growth.

A strong resurgence by Mitsui & Co.

The key to a powerful resurgence is to refocus on being 'a strong Mitsui' and on our long-standing belief that 'Mitsui is people'.

Our customers have always done business with us because of our individual strengths and personalities as leaders, so it's absolutely true to say that Mitsui's people have made a strong Mitsui.

I suspect that in the last decade we have become too inward-looking and complacent, neglecting our original strengths in networking and new business development. So this year, as we develop our new Medium-Term Management Plan, I think we have an opportunity to look closely at how we work as people, and what we can do as individuals to contribute to the resurgence of Mitsui.

Business reform aiming for growth

In the year ahead we will continue to reform key aspects of our business.

First, as part of our focus on the business front line, we will allocate management resources to fields with high actual or potential growth. To realize this, I'll be working with all our business units, in Japan and overseas, to optimize personnel allocations for business growth initiatives.

Second, we will insist on taking on challenges and getting results. All business units will create their own roadmaps to achieve their growth potential. These roadmaps need to contain challenging targets but also show the specific steps you will take to get results. That's what I mean by deliverability.

We will continue to reduce administrative burden and completely eliminate inward-focused tasks to focus more energy outwards. This outward focus creates value for society, which generates the work and income we need to grow.

Conclusion

We are currently working on our next Long-Term Vision, looking ahead ten years and beyond. However, no matter how far we look into the future, I'm certain that Mitsui's true strength will always be its people. There are unexplored strengths in each of us, and the individual actions and innovations we introduce every day will build a stronger Mitsui.

Thank you for joining me today. I wish you and your families a healthy and happy year.