NOTES FROM THE C-SUITE: CSO Masao Nishizawa
Masao Nishizawa, Managing Director and Chief Strategy Officer of Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, articulates a forward-thinking vision for navigating today’s dynamic business environment. By championing strategic alignment through enhanced collaboration and leveraging the strength of a diverse business portfolio, Nishizawa sees how the company is embracing an adaptable and innovative future. He also reflects on how organizational initiatives, such as open workspaces and increased communication, are creating a foundation for sustained growth and competitive excellence.
What is shaping your approach to corporate strategy in today's rapidly changing business environment?
As the business environment has been changing in many ways, our basic approach is to flexibly adjust ourselves to such environment through growing our existing strong businesses and developing new businesses. For such purposes, we have implemented several changes in the past couple of years, such as restructuring our organization based on the market-in approach and our core corporate functions, enhancing our talent management, and upgrading our new business development functions. While we believe such changes have worked well, we will review the progress periodically and keep adjusting ourselves to the competitive business environment.
Where do you see SC Americas’ strengths in weathering tough economic and geopolitical challenges?
In addition to the existing business portfolio and talented people including those in our group companies, we have flexible organizational structure which has brought collaboration among the different business divisions. We have a strong business development organization which could bring new business opportunities to execute, because sometimes an opportunity involves multiple business divisions combined.
Collaboration is often cited as a cornerstone of success for us. How do you plan to foster stronger synergies between different divisions to enhance strategic alignment and ultimately, improve business performance?
As mentioned in the previous part, our organizational structure has been designed to promote cross-organizational collaboration. But, at the same time, each employee's mindset is important. We have tried to increase communications – both official and unofficial – throughout the organization so that employees could understand what is going on throughout the entire organization as well as what others are doing. This is particularly important, as no collaboration can happen without knowing what others are doing. We will continue this going forward.
Looking ahead, what are your primary objectives for driving innovation and maintaining a competitive edge within the global market?
We have an extraordinarily strong business portfolio and talented people in each organization. But I believe we could do more if we could fully utilize our assets – both business and human – across our organizations. As you suggested, collaboration will be key, and our initiatives to know others continue to foster further success. We moved our New York City headquarters in September and have introduced “free address” seating together with more open spaces, which have brought more communications within the office. This is one of the examples we have provided for more collaboration. We intend to continue this as well as other initiatives.
How has the diversity of SC Americas’ business portfolio contributed to the company’s ability to navigate market challenges, such as economic headwinds or geopolitical uncertainties, and what role does it play in identifying new areas for investment?
SC Americas' asset size has been around 20% of Sumitomo Corporation's global assets and more than 60% of SC Americas' assets are from Construction & Transportation Systems, Energy, and Agri-Food & Life Science, which have been great asset mixes as the profit level of SC Americas has been relatively stable in the past couple of years. We will expand these areas through organic/inorganic growth opportunities in coming years as we have strong business bases in these three areas, which is in line with our global strategy.
In addition to the above three areas, we have portfolio in the field of Automobile, Social Infrastructure, Real Estate, and Mineral Resources as well. These diversified assets mixed with our functions such as trade & Investment, finance, logistics management, etc. could create added value to our existing and potential new customers.
As SC Americas continues to evolve, which specific business sectors or emerging markets are being prioritized for expansion, and how does this align with the company’s long-term strategic goals?
As for the new business areas, we have considered the US healthcare market for potential opportunities as we have started our investments in this field and started considering new opportunities such as recycling in what’s known as the “circular economy.”
