Message from the Chief Human Resources Officer

In 2024, DENSO celebrated its 75th anniversary. Since our founding in 1949, the conviction and relentless pursuit of our predecessors have been the driving force that has allowed us to overcome various challenges. As a result, we have created over 180 world-first technologies and products. In other words, by enhancing the ability of our people and organization to turn ideas into reality, we have helped resolve social issues by creating things that had not yet existed.

Today, in addition to changes in the operating environment, the role that humans play is undergoing significant change due to the widespread adoption of AI and other innovative technologies. As information becomes increasingly borderless and the competitive capabilities of companies become more evenly matched, the abilities of people and organizations to execute business strategies are becoming as important, if not more important, than the strategies themselves. In this era of dramatic change, I believe it is essential to align our human resource strategy more closely with our business and management strategies. I also believe we must actively invest in human capital so that we can enhance the value of both our people and the added value they create. This belief reflects the approach of “Monozukuri is Hitozukuri (Our performance relies on our people),” which DENSO has passed down since its founding, and serves as the core of our human capital management.

High employee engagement toward work and the organization is the driving force behind our efforts to resolve social issues while ensuring the well-being and growth of people. Accordingly, we view the enhancement of employee engagement, including our workforce overseas, as an important global management issue.

The overall positive response rate in DENSO CORPORATION’s engagement survey has improved from 70% in fiscal 2022 to 76% in fiscal 2025. We are working to achieve a level of 80% by fiscal 2031. Since fiscal 2023, we have focused on engaging young employees, technicians, and female employees, as the engagement level of these groups have fallen below the company average. Through an analysis of data, we have identified “real sense of growth” and “career realization” as key factors for enhancing engagement with each of these groups. Accordingly, we have implemented initiatives aimed at improving engagement, such as our three-year development program for young employees and career training for 10,000 of our technicians. As a result, our initiatives have been recognized externally for their originality and effectiveness, winning the Innovation Award at the Good Career Company Awards hosted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in fiscal 2025.

We are stepping up efforts to strengthen employee engagement not only in Japan but also on a global basis. We view the enhancement of employee engagement across all regions of operation as an important management theme. To that end, we set specific targets for each region, take action to improve engagement, and monitor the progress we make with these efforts. In fiscal 2025, we held a meeting bringing together the CHRO, regional CEOs, and regional HR leaders to exchange opinions on the current state of employee engagement. We also held discussions on the significance of pursuing globally unified efforts to enhance engagement and examined specific methods for doing so. In fiscal 2026, we will hold working groups on a quarterly basis in an effort to steadily set in motion a PDCA cycle for enhancing engagement globally.

To transform our business portfolio, which underpins sustainable corporate growth, we must work toward the qualitative and quantitative enhancement of personnel needed to execute our business strategies. To that end, we are striving to transform our human resource portfolio through the strategic recruitment, development, and deployment of human resources.

At DENSO CORPORATION, we are focusing on the qualitative and quantitative enhancement of personnel primarily in fields such as electrification, software, and semiconductors.

In fiscal 2023, we identified 40 business fields necessary for our business strategies (e.g., software and semiconductors) and appointed nearly 80 leaders responsible for cultivating talent in these domains. At the same time, we defined 535 categories of expertise needed for each identified domain. After doing so, roughly 15,000 administrative and technical employees commenced efforts to enhance their personal skills and design their careers based on these expertise categories. In fiscal 2024, we established committees centered on leaders appointed in each domain, under which we began collecting relevant expertise information. This information was then used to clarify qualitative and quantitative targets for the necessary personnel in each domain as well as to promote recruitment and cultivation initiatives by region to close the gaps between our targets and the current situation.

For example, in the software domain, around 220 engineers took on the challenge of transitioning from hardware to software roles between fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2025. Year by year, we are making progress with this kind of shift in our personnel. While realizing an optimized human resource portfolio in the fields of mechanics, electronics, and software with a view toward 2030, we will also take steps to develop system engineers who can design optimized functions across business domains from the perspectives of society and vehicles. These engineers will play a key role in the development of DENSO technologies.

We are also moving forward with efforts to bolster the ability of all employees to utilize IT and other digital technologies. In fiscal 2025, we launched a DX basics course and have been working to expand this course to Group companies since the start of fiscal 2026. Through this effort, around 6,500 employees, including those at Group companies, have begun voluntarily studying DX and implementing DX at the workplace level. In addition, 38 employees have begun pursuing new challenges through the Digital Cross-Border Challenge, an internal side-job program aimed at having employees apply their IT and other digital skills to resolve issues in other departments. The percentage of employees who can utilize advanced IT and digital tools has increased from 18% in fiscal 2023 to 41% in fiscal 2025, and we are accelerating efforts to further increase this percentage to reach our target of 55% by fiscal 2026. These initiatives have been recognized by external organizations, with DENSO being selected in 2024 as a DX Stock by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and the Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan. Furthermore, we have established an environment for making use of generative AI, and now more than 90% of administrative and technical employees have incorporated generative AI in their work.

DENSO believes that the wellspring of its innovation lies in an environment of co-creation where differing opinions and ideas are exchanged openly. To create such an environment, it is essential that our employees, with diverse personalities, recognize and respect each other’s differences. To date, we have adopted diversity as a pillar of our Hitozukuri activities, encouraging the exchange and integration of diverse knowledge and ideas. By doing so, we have enhanced our ability to turn ideas into reality and achieve corporate growth. With regard to the empowerment of women, who are a minority within DENSO, we believe that having women participate in the decision-making process—at all layers and with equal footing as men—leads to perspectives and ideas that are less likely to emerge in maledominated discussions. In turn, this has always enabled us to provide society with even greater value. Accordingly, we have set global targets and are promoting various empowerment initiatives under the leadership of the regional CEOs.