Message from the CTO

I was appointed to CTO in April 2024. The role of the Kurita Group's CTO is overseeing research and development, design, production and construction, maintenance, and intellectual property, all of which may seem even broader than what is generally associated with the term "technology." The notion of "Mastering water" that is included in the corporate philosophy of the Kurita Group represents our pride in being a technology-driven company that is wholly committed to the pursuit of water knowledge. And more than simply creating technology, we are committed to fine-tuning our technology by applying our knowledge and expertise to address the challenges that our customers are facing, and also delivering value by leveraging that technology. This value can only be provided through the combination of a broad range of technologies—not only the intangible knowledge related to treating water, but also the physical aspects of implementing them at sites, and the operation management and monitoring required to maintain reliable treatment. This is also a reason why the fields of "technology" that the CTO is responsible for needs to cover the entire value chain, from research and development to implementation at sites. My role is to spearhead group-wide initiatives for establishing technological superiority throughout this value chain—another my key responsibility is to take an overview of the state of overall technology where development tends to become short-sighted in the quest for expertise, and to enhance group-wide functionality and external coordination.

The history of the Kurita Group's technology start from water treatment chemicals for boilers, then expanding into the field of water treatment facilities. We have grown in concert with our commitment to the development of technologies through trial and error aimed at resolving the problems our customers faced as industry and society developed—these. efforts include wastewater treatment technology for addressing pollution issues arising from economic growth, ultrapure water production essential for manufacturing products during the rise of the electronics industry, and technologies for reducing environmental impact and energy creation in light of increasing social awareness of the environment. While earning the trust of customers may be possible by merely helping to resolve the problems they face, we are focusing on both logical aspects like the properties, phenomena and physico-chemical elements of water, and the reproducibility of implementing them at sites, as a means of further cementing the reliability of our technology. It is our engineers who are able to clearly showcase the theories underpinning our technologies, and so training engineers is one of the key issues of the Kurita Group.

We are mapping the human resources involved in technology to visualize our level of sufficiency, and also running the systematized educational program "Kurita-Technical Education Program" under the "subcommittee of specialized engineers," a committee that meets for promoting the transfer of technology and training of successors. In addition to this, we have started developing a roadmap for each technical field, and are discussing the direction of future technologies. Looking ahead, we will clearly set out the direction of each technology and the image that engineers should aspire to be, and incorporate them into specific training measures, while also integrating them with the business strategy of the sales division to ensure that technology is used effectively.

More recently, customers have been seeking optimal solutions for both economic value, such as increased productivity, and social value, such a reduction in environmental impact. An example with social value is where the prevention of water pollution had been sufficient in the past, but now encompasses a broad range of areas like reducing GHG emissions and recycling resources—the Kurita Group needs to work on enhancing our technologies in each one of these areas. We also believe there is an expectation on the Kurita Group by society to create technologies that will resolve potential issues by predicting social trends, while fine-tuning technological capabilities with customer value as the starting point.

The Kurita Group has used confronting customer issues as an engine for Technology growth, and while it has strengths in dealing with individual customer issues, it still tends to be weak in its approach of taking a bird's-eye view of society as a whole and innovating with social value as the starting point. Latent needs in society are like grasping at clouds with no clear subject, but they certainly exist. We are expanding our points of contact with customers from production sites to sustainability promotion departments, etc., and are taking on the challenge of identifying social issues from a diverse points of contact with sites and linking them to the creation of innovation, such as by dispatching personnel to areas where cutting-edge Technology are concentrated, such as Silicon Valley.

Another way to approach social issues is with by utilizing intellectual property. While the Kurita Group owns a large amount of intellectual property, there is room for improvement when it comes to utilizing them efficiently. We have also started utilizing the IP landscape that is based on intellectual property to identify the areas that our customers and competitors are focusing on and social trends from external IP information, and leveraging this information for our management strategy and innovation creation.

The Kurita Group's individual technologies have an extremely competitive edge, and our employees including engineers have a very strong passion when it comes to water. As the CTO, I will be pushing for collaboration between different technologies and different organizations, as well as linking up the thoughts of engineers and management in both directions, as a way of supporting advances in the Group's overall technical capabilities.

Executive Officer, Executive General Manager of Engineering Division and Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Kunihiro Kuse

• This page contains the CTO's message from Integrated Report 2024.