With the mission of “Turning encounters into innovation,” Sansan offers digital transformation (DX) services that change how we work, linking encounters with people and companies to business opportunities. In this way, we aim to realize our vision of becoming business infrastructure.
We have created unprecedented services and value by attempting business models that no person or company had ever achieved. We’ve done this not by aiming to imitate existing services but by proposing completely new forms of culture and ways of doing things. We see our growth as a result of our thinking about ideal solutions from a first-person perspective and a result of our ability to lead the market. This growth has been supported by the concept of creating new forms of value to solve problems, along with the technologies and operations that enable this. By applying this approach to business areas such as sales, contracts, and billing, we have created a multi-product structure. As a result, consolidated net sales for the fiscal year ending May 31, 2022, were up 26.2% year-on-year, to 20,420 million yen, and business expanded steadily despite the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite these outcomes, we must respond with a sense of urgency to the changes in the business environment stemming from the major social transformation that the pandemic triggered. Fewer opportunities for people to meet face-to-face during the pandemic have led to fewer business cards being exchanged. Although we’re taking steps such as striving to expand the use of Virtual Cards, as we look ahead, we expect that opportunities for face-to-face business card exchanges will remain at about 70% of their previous level and won't recover to where they were. However, our Bill One cloud-based invoice management solution has seized a major business opportunity that arose from the pandemic, and it is growing rapidly. In this way, we are affected by both positive and negative influences from the external environment. From a medium- to long-term perspective, I see the pandemic as a growth opportunity that Sansan must turn into a major shift of gears.
To convert these changes in the environment into major growth opportunities, we are renewing our main products – Sansan and Eight – which account for the majority of our sales. Sansan, initially a business card-based contact management service, has been transformed into a sales digital transformation (DX) service underpinned by the concept of being a database that strengthens sales. This database accesses more than one million items of corporate information, and can accumulate and visualize all contact points, including business cards, emails, and website-based inquiries. Eight, while retaining its main business card management functionality, has been revamped into a career profile app. While the results of these product renewals will not be immediately reflected in our business performance, they will, and must, contribute to our sales and profit growth over the medium-to-long term. Meanwhile, Bill One continues to evolve by adding invoice-issuing functionality, in addition to the existing invoice-receipt functionality. Bill One continues its path to becoming the invoice system in the future.
When we look at the potential market for Sansan and Bill One, there is still a vast open space. By addressing the range of growth strategies, as our medium-term financial goal we are aiming at both sales and profit growth from the fiscal year ending May 31, 2023, to that ending May 31, 2025. Then, from a long-term perspective of 5–10 years ahead, our roadmap leads us to becoming business infrastructure, as stated in our vision. We aim for our services to be so widely accepted and used that they are no longer a convenience but rather that they are indispensable.
We ask our shareholders and investors for their continued support and encouragement.
August 2022
Chika Terada
Representative Director & CEO
