Summary of Research Findings

COVID-19 pandemics have deprived of the normal livelihood and gave seriously negative impact to the industries as a whole by disconnecting the distribution flow between people and products.

On the other hand, there are some positive influences under the pandemics. According to this questionnaire finding out the growth industries and business opportunities that businesspeople are interested in, digitization seems to have highly attracted attention. Though digitization has been in the spot light even before COVID-19, the attention to it seems to be strengthened by the pandemics.

In the situation where no subduing of the pandemics foreseeable, those businesses that are able to consider and challenge the situation as an opportunity toward changes rather than being pessimistic and are able to generate new values are likely to accelerate their activities.

Noteworthy Topics

Predicament Generates and Accelerates New Attempts

Aiming to forecast the influence of COVID-19 pandemics to the current sales performance at enterprises and the changes in corporate management, an online questionnaire was carried out to 810 CEOs of large or mid-size enterprises and to businesspeople, all of whom at the forefront of respective businesses. In the questionnaire, a question was asked to the respondents to freely list maximum two items (technologies, business opportunities, business models, products or services) considered as most influential to the future industry sector that their companies belong to.

When analyzed the responses by keyword, “AI” was listed in the largest number of responses, with 101 respondents having mentioned. “DX (digital transformation)” which has the similar concept as AI was mentioned in the third largest number of responses, at 59. The results show how digitization is regarded as an inevitable attempt for every industry to achieve.

“Medical care” also was the keyword that earned the second largest 62 mentioning by businesspeople. COVID-19 pandemics revealed how medical systems in Japan are vulnerable as a social infrastructure and how digitization is belated partly due to regulations. With high affinity with IT, telemedicine and predictive diagnosis are likely to be in demand even by peripheral markets.

In addition, next-generation vehicles (xEVs) have ranked at fourth position, mentioned in 55 responses. Autonomous driving, CASE (Connected, Autonomous, Shared & Service, Electric) and MaaS (Mobility as a Service) have also attracted attention across industries.

Research Outline