through to the middle 1990s. In the latter half of the 1990s, however, the company's business performance stagnated due to a worldwide slump in the computer business and due to increasing competition with powerhouses in the United States and South Korea in the semiconductor market.

Noting the rapid popularization of the Internet, NEC made “Internet focus” its core policy from 2000 on and began concentrating its management resources on its IT solutions business and network solutions business even as it spun off business units that previously were its strengths, such as the DRAM, semiconductor, computer, and mobile phone handset businesses. In 2013, NEC recognized ICT’s place in advancing public infrastructure and resolving social issues as a growth opportunity and reorganized itself into five business segments: a social solutions business, which aims to establish new business models; a public business to serve domestic and foreign governments, public agencies, public institutions, and financial institutions; an enterprise business to address private-sector demand particularly from the manufacturing industry and the logistic and service industry; a telecom carrier business for telecommunications carriers; and a system platform business that provides solutions and services using various products. In this way, NEC has pivoted toward a solutions and infrastructure business while moving ahead with management diversification centered on networks and IT.

### b. Fujitsu

Furukawa Electric and Siemens of Germany created Fuji Electric Co., Ltd. as a joint venture to produce generators and electric motors in Japan. Fujitsu (Fuji Tsushinki Manufacturing Corporation at the time) was established in 1935 when Fuji Electric spun off its Communications Division.

Fujitsu enjoyed success with its FACOM M series of IBM-compatible general-purpose computers from the late 1970s through to 1990, and the company expanded into the personal computer business, developed supercomputers and high-performance servers, and endeavored to grow while working to commercialize products.

Eyeing the full-blown expansion of the Internet, the company announced a new business strategy “Everything on the Internet,” which was centered on broadband Internet, in 1999. Under this business strategy, Fujitsu concentrated its management resources on three business segments—services: providing solutions in the form of consulting, system integration, outsourcing services, and network services; platforms: providing mobile communications networks, optical networks, and server/client and other Internet-enabled products; and technology: adding higher value through state-of-the-art technology resting on system LSI, memory, and other electronic components—and directed its energy toward providing comprehensive solutions.

The company again revised its product categories in 2005 to accommodate its customers and reorganized into technology solutions—providing total solutions with high-performance, high-quality products and software services, ubiquitous product solutions to serve individual needs, and device solutions centered on the LSI business. More recently, Fujitsu has been developing businesses that deploy advanced technologies, such as big data technology and cloud computing technology, as platforms as part of its mid-term vision to construct an intelligent and abundant society through the application of ICT that the company calls a “human-centric intelligent society.”

### c. Hitachi

Hitachi, established in 1910, is a diversified electronics manufacturer that has expanded into many fields, ranging from industry and public infrastructure to consumer products and electronic components.

Hitachi had continually invested heavily in semiconductors, computers, and other aspects of the electronic field since the 1980s and revamped its business make-up by expanding the application scope of its electronics field, which had supported Hitachi's platforms since its establishment, into heavy electrical machinery and industrial machinery. Unfortunately, Hitachi, like other Japanese manufacturers, lost its global competitiveness and was forced to reorganize its business because of the commoditization of product prices, in addition to the breakneck pace of technological innovation in the semiconductor and computer business, and because of its failure to pursue the rapidly progressing trend toward international specialization. Although ICT systems have become the company's core business, since the mid-2000s electric power and industrial systems have been driving overall sales. To affect shifts in business fields, and to move ahead with overseas expansion, Hitachi has been promoting organization transformations without regard for business division or plant boundaries and creating organizations that span multiple business fields. For example, Hitachi instituted a company system on October 1, 2009, and has been pursuing independent accounting systems for each business unit in order to accelerate structural reform and bolster the competitiveness of each business unit.

In the midst of these developments, the company is positioning the social innovation business as its current and future mainstay business. In this segment, Hitachi will provide advanced public infrastructure powered by its control technologies and IT and other ICT system technologies, leveraging its strengths in materials and key device fields and other fields that combine the Hitachi Group's information and communications systems, industrial, transportation, and urban development systems, and power systems.