Making Group-wide Efforts to Stay Close to Customers and Promote Technological Innovations That Solve Their Problems: Yuki Kusumi, Group CEO, Panasonic Holdings Corporation

How has the Panasonic Group contributed to customers and society through its technology? We spoke with Yuki Kusumi, Group CEO, about the progress the Group has made and his hopes for the future.
Technology is a key source of competitiveness for the Panasonic Group. I think technology can be roughly classified into two types. One is technology that makes possible what was not possible before. An iconic example of this type is the Pepper ultra-thin radio, which was the first to use surface-mount technology in its circuitry and was put on the market in 1977. Although I say it myself, I think another exemplar is the DIGA Blu-ray Disc recorder I worked on, released in 2007, since it enabled long hours of digital high-definition recording ahead of our competitors through the adoption of a 45-nm process system LSI.