[photopress:Hiroaki_Kurokawa.jpg,full,alignright]Hiroaki Kurokawa, president and representative director of Fujitsu, said the Fujitsu plan was that sales from China will rise from the current RMB24 billion ($3 billion) to RMB60 billion($7.6 billion dollars) in 2010. Which means that Fujitsu hopes to more than double its sales in five years in China partly through a consolidation of its 39 operations in its most important overseas market.
The idea is to pull together the many subsidiaries the company has scattered around the country.
Hiroaki Kurokawa’s first job as president was to bring Fujitsu’s loss-making businesses in Japan into profitability. He has done pretty well.
In Fujitsu’s first fiscal half ending in September, the company had an operating income of $469 million in Japan, an increase of 14 percent year-on-year. Still the company is struggling with a slowdown in its home market so it intends to expand overseas. In the first fiscal half, Fujitsu’s net sales from overseas operations rose by 18.5 percent which is about four times what it did in Japan.
Haruhito Takeda, president of Fujitsu China, said his company has maintained an annual average growth rate of 25 percent since 2001. With China’s increasing demand for technology services, he said, maintaining a similar growth rate is possible.
But there is a lot of competition out there — IBM, EDS, HP Services, and Accenture.
Another issue is the highly fragmented system of subsidiaries the company has in China.
Currently, the firm has more than 18,000 employees working at 39 different subsidiaries and reporting to different departments in the Tokyo headquarters.
And there are about 1,500 technology service engineers scattered in different locations in Beijing, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Nanjing and Xi’an. Consolidation is needed.
Haruhito Takeda, said, ‘Now we have guidelines, but to execute the plan is much more difficult. Everybody knows we can compete against IBM for large clients, which usually require several hundred or over 1,000 people. But we are weak and scattered, so we must unite.’
The thought of Fujitsu being considered weak is somewhat amusing but the central thought of consolidation is plainly important and the right way to go.
Source: China Daily
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