ITO Thailand - Field Report vol.1
The Importance of Possessing a Fighting Spirit

Developing Business Activities, Centering on the Food Industry

“Thanks to population growth and trends in the ASEAN economic community, Southeast Asia is expected to experience explosive market growth. As a trading company, our establishment of a branch in Southeast Asia is likely to reap substantial advantages as we seek to strengthen our overseas business.”

Concerns such as these led the ITO Corporation to begin the search for a suitable place to open a branch in Southeast Asia in 2013. As a member of this project, I was dispatched to Thailand for three months to conduct market research. Partly thanks to this experience, I was chosen to lead the effort to establish ITO Thailand.

Currently, our team at ITO Thailand has placed the greatest emphasis on developing new business activities. In fact, ITO Thailand began with zero local customers. Since expanding our connections is our highest priority, we vigorously cultivate contacts with various local companies.

We have put the most effort into making inroads with the food industry. In particular, there is a vibrant frozen foods industry in Thailand that exports various products including fried chicken and shrimp tempura to Japan. In this highly competitive environment, manufacturers are keen to adopt new technologies to raise their production efficiency. As a result, we at ITO Thailand have placed our focus on dramatically improving processing efficiency by using industrial robots for assembly line automation.

ITO Thailand's Biggest Order to Date — Cables

The largest order received by ITO Thailand since its founding was the delivery of cables for a bottling system adopted by Company A, a major local beverage producer. There are a wide variety of cables in existence, and we put a lot of effort into choosing the best type.

Regarding the proposal, we began by analyzing the CAD diagram of the factory where the cables were slated for use. After making sure of the layout of the factory, we calculated the necessary cable size based on factors including safety considerations such as current and voltage loads. Furthermore, we considered numerous options for cable thickness, type, and budget to ultimately decide on the manufacturer who best fit the needs of the project. The sales engineers at ITO Thailand were of great help during this process. Their skill in business combined with their technical knowledge of various products was invaluable in selecting a manufacturer and estimating a budget.

Moreover, the final length of the product we delivered totaled to 18km were all of the cables joined end to end, so the delivery of such a huge product was itself a challenge. Because the distribution infrastructure in Thailand is not as highly developed as in Japan, we had to carry out the delivery ourselves. For this order, we needed the assistance of the cable manufacturer to provide two trailers and two trucks to help move several tons of cable. The delivery was safely completed this past June (2016).

Two Phrases That Are Crucial For Future Business Expansion

This order was my first time dealing with cables, and as a result, a lot of the things we did were based on trial and error. Both the fact that the order did not include detailed specifications and the fact that our company needed to oversee the delivery were things that I never experienced in Japan.

Yet operating overseas means that these kinds of novel experiences are an everyday affair. If you respond to such situations by giving up, you will never get to undertake new work. This experience reaffirmed my conviction that the willingness to overcome challenges in areas in which you have no prior experience is vital to an overseas business.

Furthermore, I realized how much working with products you have never previously dealt with requires not just expertise on a single product or technique but instead a broad understanding of multiple products and techniques. As a result, the importance of sales engineers, who possess both business skills as well as engineering expertise, is only likely to increase in the future. We are currently placing a focus on local recruitment in an effort to boost our staff in this area and further improve the workforce at ITO Thailand’s disposal.

Finally, I hope to share information even more thoroughly with our headquarters in Japan. By exchanging information and coordinating the Japanese and overseas branches into a unified entity, we will be able to expand the scope of the solutions we can provide to our customers at ITO Thailand and also create more and more new business.

“The strengthening of the workforce” and “thoroughly sharing information”— these are the two phrases that ITO Thailand intends to use as a basis for linking information in Japan and overseas, and this is how we will provide our customers with solutions that include engineering services.