News Releases

Konica Minolta Receives the Grand Prix Award
at the Nikkei SDGs Management Grand Prix
Creating New Business through a Backcasting Approach to the SDGs

December 17, 2019

Tokyo (December 17, 2019) – Konica Minolta, Inc. (Konica Minolta) is pleased to announce that the company has won the Grand Prix award at the Nikkei SDGs Management Grand Prix.

The Nikkei SDGs Management Grand Prix is designed to award those companies that are recognized as “front-runner companies that are vigorously addressing SDGs management and tying their efforts to corporate value enhancement.” Award-winners were selected by an external screening committee through a comprehensive evaluation of the initiatives and strategies of the candidate companies based on their responses to the first Nikkei SDGs Management Survey conducted by Nikkei Inc. in 2019.
Out of the 637 companies surveyed, one company received the Grand Prix award, and one each in the categories of: SDGs strategy and economic value; social value; and environmental value.

Konica Minolta’s Strategy to Address the SDGs

Currently, Konica Minolta is striving to transform itself into a digital company with insight into implicit challenges, capable of creating solutions to social issues by actively incorporating cutting-edge technologies into products and integrating them with digital input and output technology, which is a strength of Konica Minolta.

Konica Minolta believes that for companies to remain sustainable, they must be able to identify latent problems and develop solutions together with customers, beyond addressing visible problems, thereby contributing to the evolution of human society. Accordingly, Konica Minolta is making group-wide efforts to identify latent problems by envisioning the ideal world decades ahead and working backwards to determine what needs to be done now and to develop new businesses. Konica Minolta thus hopes to create new values that help to achieve the SDGs.

Winning the Grand Prix award clearly confirms that Konica Minolta’s efforts are in compliance with the principles of SDGs management, and that its achievements to date deserve public recognition.

Examples of Social Values Created by Konica Minolta

1. Connected Care with the Care Support Solutions Service

With an increasing number of people needing nursing care in Japan, the shortage of care workers has become a serious social problem. Konica Minolta therefore developed and provides the Care Support Solutions service that transforms nursing care workflows. This service detects certain resident behaviors using near-infrared cameras mounted on the ceiling along with sensors that detect slight movements and sends a notification to the smartphones of care staff. It helps care staff grasp the situation and determine the best response, and enables staff to share information in real time, thus greatly improving work efficiency. As care facilities often struggle to introduce such ICT equipment, Konica Minolta has also launched the Care Director service to train care staff as professional care directors who can analyze various data and effectively use them.

In the future, Konica Minolta plans to work with care service providers and IT companies, as well as care facilities, to create new values by sharing, interconnecting and analyzing data mutually and to develop a “connected care” approach that allows the same level of care to be received at home as in a care facility.

2. Addressing Medical Challenges in Emerging Countries with Remote Healthcare

In Bangladesh, lifestyle-related diseases are skyrocketing, and quickly responding to patient needs is a critical issue in the healthcare field. In rural areas, where 60% and more of the population lives, there is a shortage of medical facilities, equipment, and doctors. In order to receive medical treatment, patients must travel considerable distances to urban areas.
To address this challenge, Konica Minolta devised a remote diagnostic system that allows a rural clinic to take patient X-rays using portable equipment and upload the imaging data to the cloud, allowing doctors in the city to view the X-rays and make the appropriate diagnosis. After conducting a diagnostic pilot in 2017, a paid medical examination trial was begun in September 2018 in the capital of Dacca and the surrounding region, in a project adopted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Going forward, Konica Minolta will increase the number of examination sites and also work to reduce the cost of diagnostic services by analyzing collected data and introducing AI-based screening.

Examples of Environmental Values Created by Konica Minolta

1. Green Supplier Activities

Konica Minolta conducts Green Supplier activities to reduce both environmental impact and operating costs by providing suppliers with environmental technologies and expertise that it has developed via its Green Factory activities. Konica Minolta’s environmental experts visit supplier production sites and propose suggestions for improvement, outlining cost reduction benefits, investment rationale, and other information. They then cooperate with suppliers as they take action to reduce their environmental impact.

2. Building a Digital Environmental Platform

Konica Minolta has digitized and provided environmental expertise to many companies, through the biz-Library environmental management training tool and energy-saving diagnostics tool. Currently, Konica Minolta is building a digital environmental platform for sharing environmental knowledge with other companies and creating new values together. Konica Minolta hopes that the platform, through the accumulation of environmental expertise held by Konica Minolta and other participating companies, will grow and make significant contributions to solving environmental problems.

Corporate Governance at Konica Minolta

Upon the integration in 2003, Konica Minolta adopted the “company with committees” (currently “company with three committees”) structure, and has since been pursuing corporate governance that contributes to the medium- and long-term growth of corporate value. To be specific, the company ensures the separation between management supervision and execution and maintains the supervisory function of the Board of Directors by: establishing three committees - nominating, audit and compensation committees; ensuring at least one-third of the Directors are Independent Outside Directors; selecting the Chairperson of the Board of Directors from among Directors who do not also serve as Executive Officers; and delegating substantial decision-making authority to Executive Officers.

More recently, the company introduced the medium-term performance-linked stock compensation system as a long-term incentive plan as part of the revision of the compensation scheme of Executive Officers and adopted a clawback provision, with a view to increasing the transparency, soundness and efficiency of management.

Encouraged by the Grand Prix award, Konica Minolta will remain committed to delivering values to contribute to the SDGs on a group-wide basis, and grow to be a company with the ability to continue to create new values for the evolution of business community and human society.

About Nikkei SDGs Management Survey

Nikkei SDGs Management Survey makes assessment on how companies address societal, economic and environmental challenges and tie their efforts to enhancement of corporate values by integrating SDGs in their management.
The survey reviews the participating companies’ efforts and initiatives through their responses to multi-faceted questionnaires in four categories: SDGs strategy and economic value, Social value, Environmental value and Governance.

Categories and review indices
(according to Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun newspaper dated December 2, 2019)

SDGs strategy & economic value
(5 indices)
Policy, Report & Communication, Organization & In-house Immersion, Contribution to Business, and Financial Results
Social value
(5 indices)
Human Rights, Response to Consumer Challenges, Response to Social Challenges, Work Hours & Vacations, Diversity
Environmental value
(6 indices)
Policy, Global-warming Gas, Energy Consumption, Waste, Water Resources, Climate Change, Resources & Bio-diversity
Governance (1 index)Governance (board of director structure, executive compensation coupled with financial results, and so on)

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