“We’re on track to become number one by 2010.” Dave Johnson, president and CEO of Yokogawa Corp. of America, on the company’s fast growing—and increasingly global—automation business.
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Johnson went on to provide his annual state-of-the-company message. He reported that as of April 1, Shuzo Kaihori has been promoted again to CEO of Yokogawa Electric Corp. Isao Uchida will remain chairman of the board of directors. “But you should not imagine that this means that Uchida-san is retiring,” Johnson said. “He will be there making sure his vision is being followed.”
In order to become a more fully global company, which was always Uchida-san’s vision, Yokogawa Electric International was created in 2005 and located in Singapore with Teruyoshi Minaki as president and CEO.
Yokogawa’s sales are changing–53 percent of sales now come from outside Japan. “We are becoming a global company with over 85 percent of our business in measurement and control,” said Johnson.
He also discussed the first year-plus of the company’s alliance with Chevron. “Chevron can be a challenging customer,” he said, which drew a big laugh from the assembled crowd. In order to provide integration services, Yokogawa and Maverick Technologies have partnered to serve the Chevron account. Johnson even described the Yokogawa Maverick Alliance for Chevron (YMAC), which is what it will take to service the Chevron Refinery of the Future, and showed a slide of the new building wherein the YMAC is housed separately from Yokogawa.
Also new for 2008, Yokogawa has outfitted two large semi-trailers that will enable the company’s reps to show customers the integrated Yokogawa product portfolio. This is something reps don’t have the ability to do themselves, Johnson said, so Yokogawa is putting together the tools to help them.
“In the first acquisition by Yokogawa in at least ten years,” Johnson went on, “Yokogawa has acquired Analytical Specialties, Inc., a vendor of tunable diode laser gas analyzers. This will kick our analyzer program into a completely new gear,” Johnson said.
Johnson went on to discuss the competition and where Yokogawa believes everybody sits in the ratings. Last year, according to Johnson, Yokogawa became the number two industrial automation company globally. “We’re on track to become number one by 2010, but we won’t stay number one unless we become number one, two or three in North America.”
“I believe we will do that,” he closed.
