Shiseido announces move to make English its official language

According to the Asia Nikkei media platform,​ the Japanese beauty giant has announced it will be adopting English at its head offices from October 2018, in a move that has been prompted by its growth on a global scale.

Shiseido’s president, Masahiko Uotani, is reported to have announced this last week, stating that conversations outside of meetings can continue to be held in Japanese.

Shiseido has been increasingly pushing a business model that favours regional management that feeds back to a centralised leadership,​ and adopting English looks to be a step towards unifying these efforts across the world.

Hub-and-spoke​

Last year, the company announced that it would be adopting a hub-and-spoke organisational structure to facilitate responsive, global R&D.

Its Japan-based Global Innovation Centre will operate as the hub of the structure, the company has said, set to focus its efforts on base-level research once it opens at the end of 2018.

This research will then be rolled out to the regional facilities across the company’s global network, i.e. the spokes of the organisation, which will be able to adapt and target this basic research into locally-relevant products.

“Shiseido will then use regional laboratories as spokes where products and their values will be developed targeted at consumers in each area in order build ‘genuine emotional connection​’,” the company confirmed in a statement.

Vision 2020​

Shiseido’s determined efforts to create a dominant global foothold in the beauty industry plays a central part in its wider ‘Vision 2020’ strategy, which explicitly positions the brand as strong beauty leader globally.

"​It is our goal to deliver the innovative products developed based on the insights and values of our consumers around the world​," the company confirms.