Message from the CPO

The innovation that the Kirin Group aims to achieve under “Innovate2035!” is about creating new lifestyle habits and transforming lifestyle habits among our consumers and society. The source of this value creation lies in our human capital. Innovation is driven by the accumulation of each individual’s efforts in their daily work—taking on challenges, applying ingenuity, and generating new ideas.

We have consistently generated a wide range of innovations by leveraging the power of our human capital. Looking ahead, we will accelerate innovation unique to the Kirin Group by combining our businesses in Alcoholic Beverages, Non-alcoholic Beverages and Health Science, and Pharmaceuticals, along with highly specialized functions and cross-border regional capabilities. To achieve this, we must significantly evolve our human capital strategy. At the same time, the environment surrounding us is undergoing dramatic change. Population decline, increasing labor market mobility, and the diversification of work styles and attitudes toward work are all progressing, while the rapid advancement of AI and digital technologies is heightening the need to fundamentally transform our approach to human capital strategy.

We have established the P&C (People & Culture) Story to closely align our management strategy with our human capital strategy. This framework visualizes how each P&C initiative contributes to value creation, business growth, and innovation, and how it leads to the sustainable increase of corporate value. It also serves as a shared framework to foster a common understanding among both internal and external stakeholders.

At the same time, well-being is essential for our human capital to continue demonstrating its capabilities. Only when each and every employee truly experiences the “joy of working at the Kirin Group” can we bring joy to society and our consumers. In addition to improving employees’ mental and physical health and vitality, we take a holistic approach to promote well-being—aligning individual growth, our culture, and work environment with our P&C Story. Furthermore, we will instill the newly established KIRIN WAY across the Group and drive a transformation that fosters continuous innovation through both our people and organizational capabilities.

In addition, with a view to the Group’s growth and future environmental changes, we have launched initiatives from three key perspectives.

The first is the redesign of our human capital portfolio with AI as a partner. We will continuously redefine the value and roles that are uniquely human, while embedding a culture of co-creation in which people and AI work together as a team. We believe that companies that can transform these efforts into a source of competitive advantage will be the ones to achieve sustainable growth. To this end, we will evolve our talent management, centered on Kirin’s distinctive strength of “expertise and diverse experience”. This is based on our belief that it is precisely the combination of these seemingly opposing elements—expertise and diverse experience—that cultivates uniquely human capabilities in the age of AI. However, differences in approaches between Western labor markets, which are primarily position-based (job-based), and Japan, where there is a strong culture of developing human capital from a talent-based perspective, can in some cases hinder active talent mobility. While leveraging the strengths of both approaches, we aim to establish a hybrid model of talent management by advancing the visualization and structuring of skills and positions.

The second is to embed an employee-centric human capital strategy and make it a core strength of Kirin. We will thoroughly review our strategies through the lens of how employees’ mindsets and behaviors will change. In doing so, We will maximize the potential of both our people and organization and enhancing the quality and impact of our investment in human capital.

The third is the development of the foundations and data infrastructure to support these initiatives. We are now entering an era in which unstructured data can be effectively analyzed. We will continue to examine how each human capital initiative contributes to financial value, while enhancing Group-wide KPIs, strengthening the PDCA cycle, and improving the quality of our disclosures.

Companies are increasingly shifting from being the ones who choose people to being chosen by people. The belief that human capital is the source of value creation is already firmly embedded in the Kirin Group’s management. Going forward, our human capital strategy must be firmly grounded in a deep understanding of our employees. It is essential that we consistently adopt an approach that places changes and evolution in employees’ mindsets and behaviors at the center of our thinking. This also aligns with the stakeholder-driven approach to innovation set out in “Innovate2035!” I am strongly committed, as CPO, to embedding thorough employee insight and an employee-centric mindset as a defining strength of the Kirin Group’s human capital strategy, and to realizing an organization in which the growth of our people and the growth of the Group reinforce one another in a virtuous cycle.