ZHD Targets Sales of 2 Trillion Yen...
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ZHD Targets Sales of 2 Trillion Yen in 2023 "AI Utilization in All Services"
[Tokyo 1st Reuters] – Kentaro Kawabe, President and Co-CEO of Z Holdings (ZHD), said at a management strategy briefing on the 1st that sales will reach 2 trillion in 2023. Yen and operating profit of 225 billion yen. Synergy with LINE is expected in advertising/marketing and e-commerce (electronic commerce). ZHD and LINE completed their business integration on the same day.
President Kawabe said, "It's challenging to increase sales revenue by hundreds of billions of yen in three years," but points out that it's easy to create synergies in the advertising and marketing fields, where ZHD and LINE have strengths. In e-commerce, he indicated his intention to expand through mutual customer referrals.
President Kawabe said, "The key technology is AI. We will implement AI in all services." The plan is to invest 500 billion yen over five years and increase the number of AI personnel by 5,000 over the next five years.
Regarding overseas expansion, Co-CEO Tsuyoshi Idezawa, who attended the press conference, explained that LINE is expanding in Asia, including Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia. We will also incorporate success stories into the domestic market." "We will strengthen our overseas expansion by making full use of the Group's know-how and network," said Idezawa, by strengthening cooperation with SoftBank, SoftBank Vision Fund, and South Korea's NAVER.
Fintech business will be "the third pillar of business after media and commerce" (President Kawabe). Adopt a multi-partner strategy in each area. For example, Japan Net Bank will collaborate with Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, and LINE Bank Preparatory Company will collaborate with Mizuho Financial Group. On the other hand, domestic QR barcode settlement announced that it had started discussions on integrating LINE Pay with PayPay in April 2010. Globally, LINE Pay will continue.
We will continue to discuss the integration and abolishment of overlapping services.
At the press conference in 2019 when President Kawabe announced the management integration policy, he indicated his intention to aim for a "third pole" following the IT majors in the United States and China. In the IT industry, US and Chinese powerhouses such as GAFA (Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook, Alphabet's Google) and BATH (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei) are crowded together, and ZHD has a gap in market capitalization.
President Kawabe said at the briefing on the same day, "The physical strength difference between GAFA and BAT has rather widened due to the corona crisis." I showed the idea of going. Including the parent company, the company has a wide range of services, including Internet search, e-commerce, messenger, finance, and mobile phones.
As a "super app" that allows you to seamlessly use services familiar to your life in one app, LINE, PayPay, and Yahoo are each super apps with characteristics such as communication, payment, and information acquisition. We will continue to develop while taking advantage of the service characteristics of our company,” said President Kawabe.
In the management integration of ZHD and LINE, "A Holdings", which was renamed by LINE, owns 65.3% of ZHD's shares. Under the umbrella of ZHD, the company that will take over the business of Yahoo and LINE will hang. AHD shares are owned 50% each by Softbank, the parent company of ZHD, and NAVER, the parent company of LINE.
Initially, we aimed to complete the integration in October 2020, but due to delays in some procedures such as competition laws by the authorities of each country, the timing of the integration was postponed.
