Fujikura invested in DIGITAL GRID Corporation (“DIGITAL GRID”) as one part of its initiative in open innovation. DIGITAL GRID operates a business that utilizes blockchain technology* in electric power and a direct trading platform for environmental value.

The current electrical power supply system is changing from the existing system of large-scale concentration to an autonomous distributed system due to the proliferation of renewable energy and other factors. It is possible that electricity will be bought and sold through direct transactions between renewable power suppliers and electricity consumers in the future.

DIGITAL GRID is a start-up firm that was established in October 2017. As the main implementer of the Blockchain-enabled Renewable Energy Carbon Reduction Pilot Project in FY2018, a verification project of the Ministry of the Environment, the company is providing a direct trading platform for power providers and electricity consumers to trade the environmental value of renewable energy. In the future, we plan to provide a platform for trading the surplus solar power generated in individual homes directly with other homes.

Fujikura Ltd., the 39Meister Team at Hatapro, Inc., Caravan Co., Ltd., and LiveRidge Co., Ltd developed shoes equipped with special IoT sensors and a monitoring system to detect the location of those sensors. With the cooperation of the town of Kimotsuki in Kagoshima Prefecture, they performed an experiment to validate searches based assumed scenarios of actual use.

Fujikura has provided the Oxymo MVNO service to businesses since 2013. There were high expectations for being able to use the connection to location information via GPS to protect elders, but their location could not be detected unless they carried the GPS device with them. The challenge was to find a natural way for them to take it with them when they went out. We launched this project because we wanted to build a system that could find an elder faster than the currently available products. We achieved this by focusing on shoes and looking at the problem and solution from the perspective of the person looking for a lost elder. We worked with partners that each possessed strength in a particular area and the local government and verified the effectiveness of the system in actual field tests.

The Fujikura Group performs environmental assessment of products at the planning, development, and design stages to evaluate a product’s environmental friendliness over its entire lifecycle. We register more than 60 environmentally friendly products each year. The total reached 536 in fiscal 2017, and we will continue to work to improve environmental performance in the future.

After establishing an office in Myanmar in 2013, the Fujikura Group established Barons & Fujikura EPC Co., Ltd. (“BFE”), a joint venture with Barons Machinery & Engineering Co., Ltd. in 2015. This joint venture has contributed to the development of electrical power and communications infrastructure in Myanmar.

Since then, BFE has contributed to the development of Myanmar, not only through its main businesses in building substations and transmission networks, distribution substation networks, and communications networks, but also through the training of a total of 160 engineers in the latest safe methods of power distribution construction in 2015 in Naypyidaw, the capital of Myanmar.

To better support the development of Myanmar, we visited universities with engineering programs and relevant government organizations in Myanmar from 2015 onward and surveyed their needs. We then established the Fujikura Scholarship Fund and increased our donations of the Fujikura Technical Review.

In the future, the Fujikura Group will continue to help in every way possible to contribute to the development of Myanmar and achieve growth in the Power & Telecommunication Systems Company in Myanmar.