Sakie (Jodie) Akiyama is the founder and CEO of SAKI Corp. In 2005 she was elected ‚CEO of the year‘ in Japan. Sakie Akiyama was the first woman and the youngest person to ever gain this prestigious title. In an interview with EPP Europe she talks about her plans for the European operation.
What are your plans for the European operation?
Before we start with talking about our European business let me please introduce the company. There are many Japanese companies who work in this industry as you can see a lot of them in this show. Among them, Saki Corporation is considered to be unique concerning the speed of growth in the past ten years as a young and new company owned by a woman. I founded this company in 1994 together with my husband, Yoshihiro Akiyama, who is the CTO and the developer of our first product. Back in 1994, there are only two of us and we had to do all the activities including designing, selling and servicing of the systems. With our line scanning technology, we succeeded to attain large part of the market share in 10 years. Now we have over 3000 systems installed and operating worldwide and we have almost 250 employees and 7 overseas subsidiary offices in order to provide quick response to our customers.
Although we were a young and small Japanese company, at the very early stage of our business, our goal was to become a global player in the market. Because we believed that it was necessary for us to become global in order to provide sufficient supports to our customers who were global manufacturers or global EMS companies. In order to satisfy our customers’ expectations and requirements on a global scale, we started to build overseas sales and service network to cover all the regions and countries worldwide.
Firstly we focused on the Chinese market outside Japan since lot of the large manufacturing facilities moved to China in order to win the severer price competition while lot of others or the same customers spread out and located their manufacturing facilities outside China such as in Eastern Europe, Turkey or other part of the world. So we were also urged to go expand our market worldwide as the market required.
In terms of European market, we started the business in Europe cooperating with local distributors in 2003. Despite the fact that we had not had enough resources at that time to go direct business, we needed people who speaks the same language and understand the culture to do the business in each country for better communication and support. Over the past 4 years, number of distributors grew up to 12 in Europe and now more than 300 systems are installed in the field. Now, establishment of Saki Europe GmbH is to provide supports to our business partners as well as our customers in Europe. The office is located in Augsburg, Germany.
With our European headquarters we want to get closer contact to our customers and our sales partners. First class technical support is our highest priority. Within this year we will employ four engineers for service, sales and technical sales support. Furthermore we will create a support centre in Eastern Europe for our key account customers.
Do you support all European countries out of the office in Augsburg?
Saki Europe is a central hub for our service and support in Europe. Basically it is our business partners who provide sales and service directly to their local customers in their local languages and business manners with short response time, but we provide assistance when there are any difficulties or requests with no time difference whereas our headquarter is located in Japan, where we have a large time difference.
Which regions of Europe do you expect the greatest growth from?
In my point of view, it is Eastern Europe that we will have the biggest growth, because there is the biggest potential concerning the size of manufacturing facilities and growing number of foreign investment that will create more needs for AOI systems.
Which countries in Eastern Europe do you target in particular?
We see more activities and potentials in Czech Republic and also in Hungary. In fact we already have some installation base in that area and our next target is to have service and support points in Eastern Europe in order to provide efficient supports to the existing and potential customers.
Up to now, which parts of Europe are the current star performers?
This is a little bit a question of history. We started our European activities in Italy where we had a good success with benchtop systems then to Spain and with a little bit of delay in Germany. The market in Germany was already matured and the economy was not so good at that time, now we received more inquiries for AOI in Germany this year.
Can you give us a short overview of service, products and other solutions you offer to your global customers?
Today we offer a complete range of in-line and stand-alone AOI systems. At this year’s Productronica we presented our BF-GAIA for the first time outside Japan. This stand alone machine can inspect simultaneously both sides of a PCB. This machine we built on special request for a large Japanese automotive company. Further we have now our 3D solder paste inspection machine ready.
As far as our services are concerned we will establish a European R&D team to respond directly to the demands of our European customers. This will shorten drastically our response time.
EPP Europe 406
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