Home > Corporate Information > Greeting from the CEO
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 Taro Hashimoto graduated from the Faculty of Economics at Keio University in 1982. After working at Nomura Securities Co., Ltd., he joined SOFTBANK Corp. as the head of the Corporate Investment Department in 1996. He was appointed Director of JSkyB in 1997 and CFO of the Japan Digital Broadcasting Services Inc. (now SKY Perfect Communications Inc.) in 1998. He has served as CEO of this company since March 2000. |
| Our company has been involved with the distribution of content since its inception. Today our scope goes beyond simple distribution to include broadband distribution of drama/animated series, subtitling/dubbing via companies within our group, theater releases, sales of programming for terrestrial/BS/CS broadcasting, and satellite broadcasting (program-supplying broadcasting). We have also devoted a great deal of energy to developing technology that optimizes content distribution. Our determination to provide customers with optimal service has enabled us to become a company with a unique combination of technical expertise. Our company not only handles the actual content to be distributed, but also provides distribution technology services such as CDN and G-cluster. In addition, we sell mobile phones and broadband connections necessary for the distribution of content. Our three business segments (Content Services, Technology Services, and Network Sales) are partially derived from our beginning business—the CS Broadcasting Service—and partially derived from elements obtained through acquisitions and investments. On October 1st, 2007, we changed our company name to “Broadmedia Corporation” in order to reflect the new nature of our business and to better integrate its parts. In accordance with this change, we have also renewed our website. Our aim is to become a content distributor with unsurpassed distribution technology and customer acquisition ability. We hope that our company will contribute to the development of a more affluent community through the dissemination of high quality content. According to a white paper sanctioned by the Japanese government, the Japanese video content market is approximately 4.8 trillion yen in size. Terrestrial broadcasting—including NHK—accounts for approximately 3 trillion yen, while theaters, DVDs, CATV, satellite broadcasting, etc., account for the remaining 1.8 trillion yen. Currently, these numbers cannot be expected to increase beyond the normal GDP growth. In order for the Japanese content industry to grow, it is essential to expand the boundaries of the market itself. Instead of limiting our focus to Japan, we must seek new possibilities by expanding our services to countries outside of Japan—in particular, the Asian market. Successful expansion into the Asian market involves dealing with past and ongoing issues such as piracy. The recent surge of interest in Korean and Chinese culture in Japan has served as an opportunity to strengthen the ties between our markets. I believe that expanding the boundaries of the Japanese market through the spread and advancement of broadband (including mobile phones) will intensify the potential growth of both the Japanese and Asian content industries. Our content services currently include a full line of content-related businesses that range from production to distribution. These services will ultimately play an important role in the unification of the Asian market. Now allow me to speak briefly about G-cluster, our next-generation technology service that has been attracting much attention. The Japanese game industry has been operating on a global level for some time now, but primarily only for console games. Current-generation online games are remnants of the narrowband age that rely on the performance of the user’s PC, and are often versions of popular Korean titles. The G-cluster technology that is developed and promoted by our company, on the other hand, can be used as a next-gen game platform that allows anyone to enjoy games regardless of their location or the performance of their PC—all you need is a wired or wireless broadband connection. It can even be applied to fields other than games.? I would like to add that although G-cluster was designed with the international market in mind, tackling the global market involves a considerable amount of advance investments and costs. It is inevitable that such investments will affect our company’s profits for the immediate future. As a company, we will weather these initial costs and continue to work toward future advancement. Developmental technology services such as G-cluster represent the creation of new content areas. Thus with the expansion of G-cluster technology, we hope to expand not only our technology services, but our content services as well. Finally, I’d like to address network sales. This business involves recruiting distributors who sell mobile phones and offer broadband connections on a national scale. This business was originally carried out by our beginning business—the CS Broadcasting Service—and was created to promote the further expansion of our services by selling both hardware (tuners and antennae) and software (channels and packages for subscribers). In that respect, the current structure of this business may be regarded as merely provisional. However, we believe that it will evolve into a vital business segment when we ultimately offer hardware that bundles both our technology and content services. We believe that these three business segments are indispensable for realizing our corporate philosophy. Our corporate name, “Broadmedia,” is an abbreviation for “broadband media” and represents the epitome of our mission. As the name implies, it refers to the realization of a “broader media”—in other words, the expansion of current media boundaries. By continuing to provide optimal service, we hope to ultimately make our corporate name synonymous with the phrases “broadband media” and “broader media” throughout the world. |
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| October 1st, 2007 | |
