“A couple of years ago our big ICT customers in Europe and the USA started pushing NEC to change its behaviour in the area of sustainability, as part of their supply chains.” – how international standards can provoke change and how important environment was 20 years ago.

Hitoshi Suzuki, Chief Manager Social Contributions and CSR Promotions, NEC Corporation, Tokyo, Japan

According to Hitoshi Suzuki, Corporate Social Responsibi-lity (CSR) has become an important issue for global busi-ness mainly due to the negative impact that multinational corporations had and have on society – human rights abuses, misconduct, sweatshops etc. – and the environ-ment - ecological damages, growing emissions, extreme exploitation of resources etc.. What speeded up the development were the growing con-cerns over corporate behaviour ex-pressed by diversified stakeholders, especially civil society such as NGOs addressing social and environmental issues, but also by consumers concerned about environ-mental and social impact of consumed products and chan-ges in individuals’ sense of value.
Because of all these concerns, NEC makes it visible in its CSR vision that it is not enough for them to improve the company’s profitability and to be le-gally compliant, but that NEC actively strives to contribute to solve social issues through its business and community activities. Mr. Suzuki and his team promote activities like: the “Make a Difference Day” for all employees, a multitude of social engagements under the slogan “Nature, Education, Community: The Heart of NEC”, and efforts to reduce the company’s environmental impact in all value chain steps of the production process. However, it will be a long and difficult journey from using sustainability as promotion tool to fully integrating it in all core business decisions.

Enjoy part of our interesting discussion with Hitoshi Suzuki in the following statements, and you might read more about NEC’s journey in our book “MyImpact”.

Hitoshi Suzuki’s selected quotations:
“It is important for our employees to understand the im-portance of environmental and social issues. Worldwide there are quite big differences in sensitivity; while Euro-peans are very environmentally conscious, Americans are not in general, but they care much more about their com-munities.”

“A couple of years ago our big customers in Europe and the USA started pushing NEC to change its behaviour in the area of sustainability as part of their supply chains, to become at least compliant with EU standards and take more responsibility.”

“Currently we do our best to secure competitive advan-tage through minimizing CSR risks, especially product quality/safety, environment, information security, fair trade, occupational health and safety, and human rights as prioritized risk areas.”

“We are also promoting activities aimed at creating value for the society. This can be through our technological in-novations as well as with a variety of our social activi-ties.”

“Through our self-check assessments we have seen that we can improve our CSR practices by expanding our CSR management to the entire NEC group companies and the global supply chain, by ensuring sufficient CSR awareness at individual employee level, by increasing the dialogue with multiple stakeholder groups and especially by pro-moting CSR driven core business activities.”

“During my studies 20 years ago I majored in social mar-keting and was very interested in the topic of what the responsibility of corporations should be. Back then almost nobody was interested in this issue. I’m glad that today this issue is on everybody’s mind. Companies and society are ready for these discussions now and things start to move.”

“What gives me satisfaction is the conviction that we are getting better every day, better than yesterday, tomor-row better than today.”

Some background on Hitoshi Suzuki:
Hitoshi Suzuki was born and raised in Shizuoka prefecture near famous Mt. Fuji. After graduation in social marketing at Yokohama National University - in which he analyzed practices of large corporations in the field of environment -, he started his career in the marketing department of NEC Corporation.
Gradually, Mr. Suzuki got promoted to do more work for the social contributions department of NEC along with the topic getting increasing importance. The last few years his work was focused on pro-moting the corporate social respon-sibility activities of NEC around the world. In April 2004 he became the chief manager of the CSR Promotion Unit, which is responsible for all CSR related issues for NEC worldwide. Mr. Suzuki enjoys his work a lot and today he can finally implement a lot of the things he has foreseen in his BBA at the end of the 70ies.

Some background on the NEC Corporation:
With 147.753 employees and consolidated net sales of US$ 42.7 billion NEC Corpora-tion is a world leading company with three main business units:
- IT Solutions Business: Systems integration that in-cludes software and hardware such as computers, mainly to government agencies and enterprises
- Network Solutions Business: Network integration relating to the broadband and mobile communications field, mainly to enterprises and communications service providers
- Electron Devices Business: Provides semiconductors, color LCDs, electronic components, etc., mainly to elec-tronic manufacturers
NEC tries to reduce its overall environmental impact across all business processes, from R&D to product design, raw material procurement, production, distribution, product use by customers, product collection and recycling.
With its social engagement throughout the world NEC aims to make a real difference for people and shows its role-model function as socially responsible corporate citizen.

If you would like to engage with the work of Hitoshi Suzuki or get to know more about NEC Corporation please visit www.nec.co.jp/csr/en/,
or www.nec.co.jp/eco/en/annual2005,
or, for more specific opportunities, contact joanna.stefanska@myimpact.ch or wolfgang.hafenmayer@myimpact.ch directly.