Sojitz Corporation

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DX

Policy and Basic Approach

Sojitz’s vision for 2030 under Medium-term Management Plan 2023 – Start of the Next Decade – is to become a company that continues to create business and develop people. To realize this vision, Sojitz will promote business transformation and reform its business models, human resources, and work processes to incorporate digital technologies in order to pursue competitiveness and growth potential while aiming to raise the company’s corporate value.

Systems

Sojitz’s efforts to promote digital transformation (DX) are headed by the president & CEO, and each business division takes the diversity of its business portfolio into account when pursuing DX initiatives.

Sojitz’s president & CEO serves as the chairman for the DX Promotion Committee, which convenes once a month to assess and share overall progress on all company-wide DX initiatives and to verify the effectives of DX measures. Sojitz’s president and CEO has continued to stress through internal and external communications the importance of DX and how digital advances are foundational to realizing value creation. In December 2021, Sojitz appointed Tomomi Arakawa as Chief Digital Officer (CDO) to oversee DX implementation and serve as an advisor to the president on the technology front of the DX process. Tomomi Arakawa brings experience from her previous roles, including as IBM Japan’s former Director and CDO. Additionally, to accelerate data collection and data utilization for market-oriented initiatives, Sojitz has appointed a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) with the aim of strengthening information security to prevent personal information leaks and data corruption.

In 2021, Sojitz newly established a CDO Office led by the CDO as a specialized organization to support DX implementation across Sojitz’s businesses. The CDO Office will be involved from the earliest stages of project creation, which includes identifying key issues. Through its CDO Office, Sojitz aims to pursue DX initiatives independently without dependence on outside vendors.

各本部の事業内容に応じたDXの取組み

Initiatives

At Sojitz, we are working to recruit human resources, accumulate data, and install infrastructure to transform our organizations and human capital. For general trading companies that possess multiple types of business models, it is difficult to implement DX measures uniformly across divisions. Sojitz is therefore engaged in the creation of customized DX measures with different implementation styles for introducing DX that will be best suited to each business, and the company is working to acquire related knowledge. Sojitz strives to pursue DX measures through targeted implementation of DX for each business in order to provide customers with greater value at a faster pace while aiming to maintain and strengthen the company’s competitive advantage and contribute to value creation.

DX推進委員会がモニタリング

Sojitz has established an appraisal system for individual employee performance that allocates a maximum of 20% to new challenges, including DX initiatives. Sojitz’s appraisal system thereby aligns with efforts for promoting DX within the company.

Sojitz refers to human resources capable of utilizing internal and external data and digital technologies to transform business models and processes as “digital-proficient human resources,” and the company is dedicating efforts to cultivating employees with digital fluency. Specifically, we have defined two levels for digital-proficient human resources—basic level and practical application level—and we have set targets such as having all employees acquire the skills necessary for reaching the basic level within the next five years as well as to have 25% of employees obtain practical application-level skills in the same period. Additionally, Sojitz seeks to recruit data scientists, system developers, and other digital sector experts from outside the company.

Through this systematic approach toward fostering digital-proficient human resources, Sojitz aims to raise its overall level of IT literacy to the point that all employees are capable of using digital technologies and ensuring sufficient cybersecurity. The operating environment is constantly changing to alter the skills required and the importance of these skills therefore fluctuates with time. Taking these factors into account, Sojitz will continue to advance DX projects while introducing flexible and proactive key performance indicators related to the development of human capital, and these KPI will be revised and updated as necessary.

Targets and KPI for Digital-Proficient Human Resources

Targets and KPI for Digital-Proficient Human Resources

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