Translated from 日本語 • View original Happy New Year, everyone!
When I looked it up, I found out that I was writing about a movie Slam Dunk. I feel the speed of time passing.
(New Year's blog for the beginning of 2023: Color your work with Excitement!)
I had a feeling that last year would be quite a challenging year, and I wrote a blog like that, and it was actually a difficult year.
First of all, from the macro perspective, the political situation in the world suddenly became unstable, such as the start of the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Gaza conflict.
In the economy, global inflation occurred, and along with it, inflation began in Japan for the first time in 30 years. Even eggs, which were honor students, have been raised in price to more than double the price of a little while ago, and the beef bowl is more than 500 yen per cup. I feel the inflation announced by the Bank of Japan in my daily life, which is far from 2%.
In the midst of these changes in the global environment, the salary gap between Japanese companies and global companies has widened, and the competitiveness in recruiting human resources is bottoming out, making the situation even more severe.
In the management of Japanese companies, including Karakul, I feel that the risk of continuing to develop business with only Japanese human resources for the Japanese market has increased even more.
2023 Recap
To sum up Karakul's 2023, there are two main points.
First of all, the ratio of foreign employees has risen to about 30%, communication has been rapidly translated into English, and the globalization of the team has progressed. By the way, there will be a total of 14 hires in 2023. Of these, 10 (71%) were foreign nationals.
All company-wide meetings were in English, and conversations in English were exchanged normally, making it more international.
At Karakul, there are two pillars of business, one is our own product business, including Colorkrew Biz. In this regard, there was originally a large ratio of developers and designers, so communication was conducted in English for a long time.
As for the client business, which is another business, it is organized mainly by Japanese members, and until about two years ago, most of the work communication was conducted in Japanese, but in 2023, the team will gradually become more globalized, and English is becoming essential for communication in this business as well.
Second, we have made significant changes to our policy regarding the company's business Portforio. Our future policy is to organize non-focus areas and businesses that generate only one-time profits (flow business) and focus only on stock businesses that accumulate monthly sales, such as our own products.
In fact, this policy was decided a few years ago, but in terms of substantial changes, 2023 can be said to be a milestone year.
2024 Aspirations
From here, I will write my resolutions for 2024.
As a major premise is to deepen the globalization of the team and the focus on the business we focus on, we want to make this year a "year of product creation."
From the perspective of in-house products, so far, HR Tech's Goalous and General Affairs Tech's Colorkrew BizI came mainly to it. The two products supported new ways of working, including hybrid work, and were targeted at a relatively niche and narrow niche.
In the future, we will expand our target market and aim to be a company that provides integrated solutions that support the new era of "hybrid work".
To this end, we will further strengthen the global recruitment of UXUI designers and software engineers involved in product development.
At the same time, we will expand our target market. Until now, we have been expanding our business in Brazil based on the Japanese market, but from this year onwards, we have decided to expand into new countries every year.
Along with this, we will also strengthen the teams in each country.
It's a chaotic karakul that I do too much at once, but I'm going to go at full throttle for a year this year, so thank you for your patronage!