SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son took the stage at SoftBank World 2014 this morning to share his revolutionary ideas for reversing Japan’s declining economy. If you’ve been following SoftBank recently, it should come as no shock that one of Son’s proposed remedies is the implementation of a robotic workforce. He also stressed the importance of utilizing existing technology – smartphones, tablets, and cloud computing – to gain an edge over the competition.
“Japan used to be a ‘sunrise’ country, but for the last 20 years or so there’s been an image of a sinking country,” he told the audience. “Thanks to Abenomics, there is an atmosphere of economic recovery. However, when it comes to GDP, Japan is now number three. India and other countries are catching up to us very quickly.”
Son explained that the shrinking domestic labor population, an effect of the concurrent aging and shrinking of the Japanese population as a whole, is a major contributing factor in the economy’s decline. He said that Japanese companies must utilize the “information big bang” while “weaponizing” productivity.
“In the past, we’ve been stingy with memory capacity and connectivity speeds – we will soon have infinite amount of [both],” Son said. “All of this data and information will be stored in the cloud. The work style of people will fundamentally change.”
The SoftBank CEO quipped that his company was the first to provide smartphones, tablets, and cloud access to 100 percent of employees. He added that SoftBank provided iPhones to its entire staff even before Apple and urged those in attendance to propose such measures at their own companies.
Son said that, within SoftBank, per employee productivity doubled between 2009 and 2014 due to the implementation of these three technologies, as all other Japanese companies saw productivity decline.
He also pointed to a pivotal point in Japan’s feudal past – the shift from swords to firearms during the Sengoku Period – ushered in by samurai warlord Nobunaga Oda.
Oda unified Japan because he implemented guns earlier than anyone else.
Historical events that change the world are triggered by someone leveraging these advanced technologies at the right moment in time.
He also announced that the company has partnered with VMware for cloud management and GE for industrial internet. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt delivered a video message expressing his excitement to be working with SoftBank:
“The global economy is driven by great entrepreneurs. I lead a 100-year-old company that was once led by Thomas Edison, and I look at Son san as one of the great leaders in the world.”
Robots to the rescue
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