Corporate Visit：Hamada Co., Ltd.- PREX Island
Enterprise managers Messages
The value of reuse technology for storage batteries
During a survey in Bangladesh held in January 2013. Mr. Hamada is third from the right.
The main business of our company is the collection of industrial waste and intermediate disposal. We have talked mainly about this in the seminars. One of the company’s businesses, the collection, disposal, reuse and recycling of storage batteries, was once introduced to a seminar participant from a region without electrification. He was extremely interested, calling it “a technology necessary for my own country.”
In Japan, which naturally has electricity, battery reuse is not a technology that attracts much attention. In addition, there is a huge barrier here between “new items” and “secondhand items,” and the secondhand items usually don’t catch on. However, for regions without electrification, we now believe that this technology will become necessary.
But on paper, the argument in favor of acceptance in those other countries is gaining ground, based on market analyses and other perspectives, even though we don’t have any employees who are willing to go there and check it out. For our company, whose people and resources are spread around, it’s a situation that has us wondering whether this technology would really catch on in foreign countries. I feel that if we go overseas, then the English language would become an issue. If it’s only a problem of language study, we have already acquired women with Taiwanese nationality and human resources who have taken English courses. In terms of business, however, I imagine that a country’s culture, habits and business experience are essential.
Meanwhile, we participated with the support of PREX in field survey activities in Senegal and Ethiopia that were implemented by JICA in 2012. As for Senegal, I heard that JICA’s survey team is dispatched and so I made a young company employee take part. According to his report, he was welcomed wherever he went, and he seemed also to have been warmly welcomed everywhere, more than with other survey teams or local visits attended by trading companies. His acceptance is believed to have been due to JICA’s contributions to the local areas, it seems.
To date, 104 seminar participants from 39 countries have visited our company through PREX’s activities. We have been given the opportunity to accept the participants and go on local visits, renewing the acute sense of the value of our company’s technologies, which can be of use in developing countries. I hope we will be able to make a contribution with storage-battery reuse in regions without electrification.
- Date : April 22, 2013
- Name : Mr. Tokusuke Hamada
- job name : Representative Director
