AMITA designs the future

Increasing volatility and uncertainty around the globe

Over the past three years, the world has become increasingly volatile and unpredictable with a series of confounding events happening successively, such as the COVID-19 global health crisis, the prolonged Russian-Ukraine military conflict, the escalating combat between Israel and Hamas, extreme weather events, and soaring materials prices. Against this backdrop, the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos in 2021 chose the theme “The Great Reset,” which represented a collective commitment to build the foundations of an economic and social system for a more fair, sustainable, and resilient future. The WEF’s Global Risks Report 2023 uses the term “polycrisis” to describe how the world is facing a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects.
In 2024, significant political events and developments are scheduled or expected to take place in Japan and abroad, including the U.S. presidential election. In an emerging political landscape in some countries and regions, populism is likely to gain the upper hand over economic rationality, posing a risk to social stability.

Growing anxiety drives future-building efforts

People around the world are deeply concerned about today’s VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) society. Nonetheless, the modern industrial model—characterized by technological innovation that exploits a seemingly inexhaustible supply of natural resources to meet people’s insatiable demand for goods—has been around for only a few hundred years, a mere fraction of time in the billions of years of the earth's history. In the age of unstable supplies of materials and goods, unpredictability is a normal state of society, and predictability is a temporary deviation from that norm. In the natural state of things, predictability hardly lasts for an extended period of time. Therefore, adaptability is what it takes to survive today and tomorrow’s polycrisis-laden society. When negative energy, fed by people’s collective anxiety, is transformed into a positive drive for security and stability, it will trigger drastic social change.

Anticipating that the COVID-19 pandemic would bring a transformative change to the world, AMITA launched the Social Systems Design Business in January 2021, which serves a society or a community as a whole. With the goal of growing this business into another core business line for the Group by 2030, we developed—during the Business Development Phase from 2021 through 2023—services and solutions to assist businesses and municipalities in achieving greater corporate and community sustainability, aggressively pursued cross-industry partnerships, and made our operating foundation more robust and resilient.
In November 2022, we announced AMITA Vision 2030. It is our commitment to achieve an ecosystem society by 2030 by transforming today’s linear produce-sell-consume economic model into a social model that emulates a natural ecosystem, to turn a diverse range of unpredictability into predictability and stability. Turning the unpredictable into the predictable is AMITA’s greatest core competency, which has enabled us to create novel value for society and industry in the 47 years since our founding.

Self-organization that brings order out of chaos

In the centuries of history of disaster-prone Japan, people have forged and maintained a strong bond among themselves to survive one crisis after another flexibly and effectively. On their own initiative, people have worked with their families, relatives, and friends to weather an ever-changing living environment, unknowingly affecting those around them. The continual cycle of such autonomous interactions among groups of people brings order out of chaos, providing a basis for creating stability. This process is called self-organization.
AMITA aspires to help build a cluster of self-organizing communities based on relationships of trust among people and businesses and network them to achieve greater stability and security around the world. We cannot achieve this high-minded vision on our own; we must join forces with like-minded entities so that we can tap into each other’s strengths while recognizing and supporting each other’s weaknesses. Only when we establish solid relationships with our partners can we turn the unpredictable into the predictable.

The J-CEP (Japan Circular Economy Partnership), a cross-industry alliance for promoting a circular economy, which AMITA helped establish in 2021, is a case in point. In only two years since its founding, 59 companies from diverse industry sectors have become its members. Under the J-CEP, member companies bring their informational, intellectual, and network assets to jointly build a foundation for circulating materials, turning an unpredictable practice of procurement into a predictable one.

Overcoming immediate challenges in order to fulfill people’s hopes for a better future

In today’s VUCA environment, a growing social trend of pursuing quick-fix solutions and tangible near-term results makes public policymakers and private decision-makers nervous about acting quickly. Furthermore, during 2023, devastating weather events and increasingly serious disruptions in global supply chains had an adverse impact on our Japanese corporate clients’ business operations, which in turn hindered us from implementing our business plan as intended or scheduled. We intend to use the lesson we have learned from this setback to better manage our business going forward.

Be assured that we are on track to expand the scope of our corporate partnerships and implement AMITA Vision 2030. With renewed determination to build an ideal society and a firm belief in the notion that a team of ordinary people can do something extraordinary, AMITA is committed to building a better future and achieving an ecosystem society in which every member plays a leading role, as well as a supporting role.

I would much appreciate it if you would continue to extend your support to us in this challenging but inspiring endeavor.

January 2024
KUMANO Eisuke
Chairman and Chief Visionary Officer AMITA HOLDINGS CO., LTD.