New Year Greetings
Chairman & CEO, SoftBank Corp.
Happy New Year to all of you.
2014 was a major step forward for the SoftBank Group.
Thanks to the tremendous efforts to enhance our network for the smartphone era, we were able to achieve No.1 in connectivity, communication speed and customer satisfaction according to third party surveys in Japan. Ymobile Corporation, a newly born company in July, launched a new mobile Internet service in collaboration with Yahoo Japan Corporation. The world's first personal robot that can recognize emotions, “Pepper”, was launched to pioneer a brand new business domain. In the United States, Marcelo Claure assumed the CEO post of Sprint Corporation, and Sprint is making extensive progress toward further growth under his strong leadership. In addition, we have been building a robust business base to maximize Group synergies through a number of investments into Internet venture companies, mainly in India and Southeast Asian countries, where remarkable growth is expected to continue.
2015 is going to be an epoch-making year with the launch of Pepper for the consumer market, marking the first robot to become a member of the family. New, sophisticated smartphones and tablets will be available one after another. With all these changes, some of you may think that the technology of the Information Revolution has already entered a mature phase, but I believe otherwise. I think this is only the beginning. Memory, CPU processing power, and computing power doubles every 18 months, as does communication speed. These will increase at an accelerated pace, and in 15 years, these numbers will increase 1,000 times, and another 1,000 times in 30 years. With such enormous amounts of information, everything will be connected to the Internet, and people will be able to communicate with robots like Pepper who recognize emotions. I strongly believe that these advances will change our lifestyles dramatically. This revolution will not only influence our business or daily lives, it will also influence various industries such as healthcare and education.
Our primary job is to always lead such a new era, and work for people's happiness. This was our basic principle when we started our business. Our Group always values these basics, and keeps challenging itself to take on new things while keeping eyes on the future.
Information Revolution — Happiness for everyone.
Guided by this corporate philosophy, we will continue to press forward.
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