Financial & Logistics Business Unit - Business Overview
Townscape of Pilsen with factories. This is the fourth largest city in the Czech Republic. "Pilsener," a beer brewing method, comes from the name of this city.
More and more Japanese companies have entered Central Europe since the middle of the 1990s, with a view to advancing into the European market. At the beginning, advancement into Hungary attracted much attention, while some companies later launched into the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. Currently, approx. 200 Japanese companies have business arms in these four Central European countries.
One of the issues faced by such Japanese companies is the improvement of production efficiency. Even companies that have established some of the most effective production systems in Japan face with great difficulties in getting similar systems to work in other countries due to the differences of languages and cultures.
In light of this situation, in 2000, Sumitomo launched its new logistics services to provide know-how and human resources that can function as part of the production process of our customers. We are now comprehensively supporting overseas production by Japanese companies in transportation and distribution, by offering these new services in addition to our traditional transportation services that cover land, sea, and air transportation—our original global logistics business.
Staff members of the Czech branch of SGL Europe. About 100 people, including partners, are in charge of the management of the warehouse.
Through our logistics services, we help our customers manage parts and materials, and offer advice aiming at overall optimization, while reviewing production processes from the three perspectives of "human resources"("Hito"), "information"("Joho"), and "materials"("Mono"). We also propose improvement measures for realizing efficient systems that eliminate wastefulness in production.
As these services have produced increasing achievements, we planned to organize a special team to support advancement by Japanese companies into Central and Eastern Europe. In 2006, a branch of Sumisho Global Logistics Europe was opened in the Czech Republic, engaging in wide-ranging logistical functions. Staff members who have both knowledge and practical experience in logistics were assembled from various fields, so that accumulated skills and know-how could be concentrated in the branch.
