Sustainable Corporate Value Enhancement Centered on Purpose

Based on our people, our technologies, and our customer base, we will turn our diversity into competitiveness and advance our management focused on sustainable value creation.

The Japanese economy has stagnated for many years, ever since the bursting of its economic bubble. During this period, corporate management has had to make structural changes, not simply pursuing short-term results but also building medium- to long-term value and achieving sustainable growth. In recent years, the government has set forth a strategy of national growth, and the conditions surrounding companies have undergone tremendous change due to factors such as the improvement of the investing environment and corporate governance frameworks. Japan's Corporate Governance Code formulated in 2015 is a representative example of these changes. It requires companies to focus more on accountability and capital efficiency, and to work to create value over the medium to long term.
​As the business environment has changed, the Group has looked back on its history, from the days of its foundation, and outlined the direction it seeks to take in its management over the five decades to come. Ever since it was established as a sales company for Canon's business machines, the Canon MJ Group has diversified and strengthened its sales channels by expanding its regional sales locations and forming partnerships with retailers, with the mission of delivering Canon's sophisticated products to customers nationwide. Through these efforts, we were able to form a broad customer base, steadily nurture our marketing capabilities, and contribute to the establishment of the Canon brand throughout Japan. To go beyond just selling products and create even greater added value to customers, we entered the software business in the 1970s. Since then, we have expanded to handling products from other companies and entering the IT field. We have also expanded our business domains through M&As and capital and business alliances, evolving the structure of our business in line with the changing times. Through this process, people with varied backgrounds have joined the Group, and our workforce has become steadily more diverse.
​We place great value on growing together with our customers, and we have nurtured our people, our technologies, and our customer base as strengths that support our value creation. The Group is rich in diversity in each of these areas. We offer various products, such as cameras, business devices, and semiconductor-related equipment, but we also provide wide-ranging value matched to our customers' needs through our SI services and our IT services, such as ITO and BPO. The Group's strengths include our collaboration with varied business partners and our broad customer base, which ranges from large corporations to quasi-major and upper medium-sized enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises, and individual consumers.

The growth of diversity also has the potential to lead to a lack of cohesiveness in organizational and managerial direction. For us to continue our growth investments and turn our diverse personnel, technologies, and businesses into a competitive edge, I have come to see it as essential that the entire Group shares a common direction.
​Since 1988, the Canon MJ Group has been implementing sustainability management under the Canon Group's corporate philosophy of Kyosei. The Group is committed to solving social issues through its business activities while maintaining harmony with people, society, and nature. In recent years, we have gone beyond just activities that focus primarily on responding to the requests of society to also more tightly link these activities with our business. We have taken them to a new level, in which they are even more effective in solving social issues through our business. As social issues grow more complex and severe, we will use the power of marketing to continue contributing to the solving of an even wider range of social issues. To do this, in January 2024, we declared ourselves a MIRAI Marketing Company and also announced our Purpose, "Bringing together hopes and ideas with technologies to create a future beyond imagining," which encapsulates the significance of the Group's presence in society.​

Ever since we announced our Purpose, our top management has worked to establish it both inside and outside the Group by creating opportunities for ongoing communication and dialogue. As a result of these efforts, a growing number of employees see the Purpose as relating to their own operations and try to embody it through behavior that contributes to the improvement of our business value. In tandem with this, we are starting to see the appearance of concrete initiatives that contribute to both the creation of social value and the expansion of revenue opportunities through our business activities. Initiatives that leverage the Group's strengths and knowledge are being implemented as business projects and helping produce new opportunities for creating value. This is happening in areas such as contribution to disaster prevention and mitigation in response to climate change, contribution to regional security and safety, identity verification and fraudulent transaction prevention in line with increasingly sophisticated financial transactions, and medical information coordination that supports comprehensive community care. As these initiatives become more widely implemented, there are also a growing number of opportunities to discuss questions, exchange ideas, and conduct workshops with those outside the company regarding the formulation of the Purpose and our approach to instilling it. Resonance with and trust in our Group are ultimately helping to strengthen our medium-to long-term business foundation.

In promoting sustainability management at the Canon MJ Group, we define new material issues (material topics) as "themes of high importance to the Canon MJ Group and its stakeholders that should be addressed intensively." We are tackling these material topics as management issues, which meet the expectations and needs of our stakeholders, and reflect their relationships with our business and their impact on our medium- to long-term corporate value. To implement these initiatives as a united group, we established the Sustainability Promotion Committee in February 2021. The Committee is chaired by the president & representative director, who has a supervisory role for all sustainability-related matters. In deliberating and formulating our Purpose, during the latter half of the deliberation process, Sustainability Promotion Committee meetings were held jointly with the Brand Strategy Committee, and participants discussed how to share the Purpose in and outside the Group and what initiatives to carry out to instill it, in addition to the Purpose's content. Since 2023, the Sustainability Promotion Committee has been under the direct supervision of the Board of Directors, as the matters discussed and resolved by the Committee are important matters that relate to the core aspects of management.
As the Purpose has become more fully instilled and embodied in the Group, in 2025, we reviewed our material issues and newly formulated material topics applied from 2026. This review was rooted in our corporate philosophy and placed great emphasis on having a management system in which there is a consistent and continuous thread that links our Purpose, Long-Term Management Objectives, material topics, and Medium-Term Management Plan. Led by this management system, our Purpose is more than a philosophy. It is extended through our material issues into specific management issues and actions and tied to the duties and operation targets of each and every division and employee.​