New Year's Greetings

Masashi Takahashi Representative Director (CEO)

At the very start of the New Year, I would like to extend my warm greetings to all, and, furthermore, to express my sincere appreciation of your continued patronage and loyalty toward Mitsue-Links.

Thanks to your support, we are now in our 33rd year of business. The life span of a company is said to be 30 years, with newly established companies having a mere 0.021% chance of lasting such a period, however, fortunately, we have managed to overcome the many great challenges we have faced, including the bursting of the IT bubble in the 2000s, the Global Financial Crisis, the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the continuing novel coronavirus pandemic. I am deeply moved by our success. Therefore, I would like to express my gratitude to our outstanding employees, as well as to our clients, and to society for such genial support.

As we approach a new era, with a new generation rising, we are now approaching a period of great change.

At first glance, we may seem to be a company with our organizational strengths committed to "quality" and "technology". However, our true power lies in our "abundance of innovative people with unique and bold ideas and the ability to take action. In other words, we're a group with great individual strengths. Our talents are now shifting focus with an emphasis on creating for, and meeting the needs of, the next era.

Going forward, please expect even more interesting moments for Mitsue-Links.

As always, I kindly ask for your continual support and wish you good health, prosperity, and a happy New Year!

Taku Fujita Corporate Director (Co-CEO)

I wish you all a very Happy New Year!

So, 2022 was a year of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), as evidenced by the conflicts in Eastern Europe, inflation in the U.S., and the sharp depreciation of the yen, however, despite such circumstances, Mitsue-Links continued to move forward and is now commencing its 33rd year of business. This is all thanks to the involvement and support of various people, and I can only express my most sincere appreciation.

Mitsue-Links was founded in July 1990. At that time, our founder, Masashi Takahashi, read Noboru Makino's book "The World in the 90s: All Predictions" (published by Diamond Inc.) and was inspired by the chapter "Communication Forms in the Age of Media Complexity". At the beginning of the chapter, Makino mentioned the strong presence of mass media and the relatively uniformity of consumer needs, and then continued as follows:

However, as society has matured and consumers' values and behaviors have become more diverse, their needs have become more individualized, and the need to provide more detailed information has increased. This has led to a demand for more personalized forms and content of information provision. (part of original text omitted)

So, communication through advanced horizontal networks, in which transmitted information is received through personal human and information networks, would increase. With this forecast, Mitsue-Links commenced development of telefax and voice provision systems under our, then, Mass Media and Personal Media-linked information services.

When viewing Mitsue-Links as a web-related company, I believe that the flows of its business activities can be broadly categorized into 10-year units. Our web business commenced in November 1994 with the establishment of the "Internet Business Preparation Office" and the establishment of the "Web Design Division" in March of the following year. For Mitsue-Links, which had been pursuing a more horizontal personal media, the advent of the web was our "big chance." However, the web industry was still in its infancy, and there was little information available, so we had to employ much trial-and-error. Fortunately, various motivated and talented people that were up for a challenge joined the company, and the scale of our web business gradually expanded. Then, to support further expansion, we acquired ISO9001 certification in 2000, being the first company in our industry to do so, and a foundation was created that ensured we could provide and maintain quality services to our customers.

The decade beginning in 2004 could be referred to as our Web Standards era. In April 2004, we renewed our website in compliance with web standards, registered as a W3C member, and launched the "Web Standards Compliance Service". While many websites were still using table layouts that didn't separate document structure and visuals, Mitsue-Links was one of the first companies to work with web standards, and many engineers who shared our enthusiasm for our efforts joined our team. Furthermore, our salespersons and directors who responded so well to this new initiative also contributed greatly to the success of the project. I strongly feel that these 10 years of hard work on web standards have become the foundation of the present-day Mitsue-Links.

We could say that the decade starting in 2014 was a period of further establishment. Around 2010, phrases such as "Customer Experience" began to increase in the global web industry, and services such as A/B testing, personalization, and MA emerged. As the web industry expanded in this way, we wanted to carefully consider our future direction before hastily establishing new services. Amid such circumstances, for the 2014 fiscal year, Mitsue-Links decided to adopt the slogan "Operation First".

Related to this, web standards-aware design and technology made it easier to convey information to people and machines. In fact, they also make it easier for people and machines to operate the web. By putting post-launch operations first, and designing in compliance with web standards, with high reusability, we can deliver a more operation-friendly web.

Therefore, we felt that we could further support our clients by positioning such a stance as part of Mitsue-Links' brand. Since then, we have continuously elevated our competencies through both internal education and management system to reach a level where designing in parallel with web standards is now natural for our employees.

Now, as we approach the 2024, the next decade-long term begins. Looking at recent trends, we can see a new world based on serverless, headless, Web3, and the distributed Web. As I reflect, isn't this an extension of Noboru Makino's prediction from the 1990s, which provided a direction for Mitsue-Links, "communication through advanced horizontal networks, in which transmitted information is received through personal human and information networks, would increase." In other words, I believe such reasoning is not far from our current Mitsue-Links' approach.

In addition, the rise of sophisticated AI has been remarkable, and we would like to work in this area as well. Web standards, which are the cornerstone of Mitsue-Links' business, are specifications for communication not only with people but also with machines. Through such a connection, we would like to work not only with AI but also to nurture the technology.

When we consider the 2024-2033 period, however, we should also be aware of the situation in Japan. In "The Path to 2075" released by Goldman Sachs on December 6, 2022, Japan's future is predicted to be anything but sunny.

The report lists five conditions for growth, one of which is "education". The development of the "serverless, headless, Web3, distributed Web, and AI" technologies mentioned earlier is partly due to intellectual exchanges on GitHub. Regarding the future, overseas there are cases where middle and high school students are writing amazing code. Unfortunately, however, there are still very few young Japanese writing such code. Perhaps with an impending sense of crisis, from 2025 all national universities have officially decided, through the addition of "Information Studies" to the current "5 subjects and 7 modules," to expand entry examinations to a "6 subjects and 8 modules" model. This will advance information studies related curriculums and studies.

At Mitsue-Links, we are keenly aware of the importance of educating the younger generation, as they are the ones who will go on to lead us and Japan.

Related to this, from January 1, 2023, Mitsue-Links began supporting CoderDojo Japan (in Japanese). We would like to get involved in a project that supports the nurturing of future human talent.

Finally, as we look toward the next decade, considering VUCA and emerging paradigms, I am committed to reconsidering what it means to be Mitsue-Links. In doing so, I look forward to your continued guidance and support.