Mr. Kersi Aspar

Yokogawa Engineering Asia, a subsidiary of Yokogawa Electric Corporation, Tokyo, Japan, was recently awarded the "2008 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific Distributed Control System (DCS) Company of the Year" award for outstanding performance of its DCS across the Asia Pacific region, comprising of South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Yokogawa Engineering Asia was also the second most successful company for the year in the region, doing well with its competitive products in automation and software markets.

Mr. Kersi Aspar, Executive Vice President YEA, spoke recently to Satish Lele, Vice President at Frost & Sullivan about what makes Yokogawa one of the most preferred companies for automation users and how they are tiding over the current economic environment.

Kersi Aspar (Yokogawa): On behalf of Yokogawa in Asia, I would like to thank Frost & Sullivan for affirming Yokogawa's leadership for DCS in Asia Pacific. We are very honoured and proud to be conferred this Award.

We are very pleased that our customers recognize us for high product reliability, robustness and unbeatable service attitude of our vigilant-minded staff, always "going the extra mile" to serve them. The Control systems are critical components for process plant automation and customers are always looking for products and solutions that fully meet their requirements. If the initial choice during the project phase is not optimal, the end-users always look for opportunities to change the systems when it is due for migration or upgrade. All of the above factors have helped us to achieve this leadership and we would like to sincerely thank our customers for believing in us.

Kersi Aspar (Yokogawa): For us, the customer always stands above anything else and meeting their requirements, irrespective of the economic situation, is always our priority. We strongly believe in innovation and we constantly invest in developing breakthrough technologies and state-of-art solutions to meet constantly evolving automation requirements throughout the customers' plant lifecycle. Over the years, Yokogawa has earned for itself a solid reputation for delivering quality and reliable products and solutions to the process industries. We believe that as we deliver high value toward their plant operational excellence throughout the lifecycle, and our strong commitment to the partnership for their long term business success, Yokogawa will continue to be their dependable partner of choice.

Kersi Aspar (Yokogawa): As explained earlier, end users look for products which they can "install and forget". They also prefer local engineering and services with expertise similar to those which comes from the headquarters. Reliability is inherently built into our products, and for this region, we have constantly invested in developing resource capabilities in each of the countries over the last 30 years. In essence, our vision and commitment fulfils what customers are looking for, which has contributed to our success. Therefore, by being close to the market, we will continue to meet and exceed customers' expectations and continue to grow and enhance our leadership position.

Kersi Aspar (Yokogawa): Staying close to the customer is always our motto during good times and also especially true during difficult times. During these difficult times when business volume is small and competition is severe, we believe that our local presence, "going the extra mile" culture and strong partnership with customers will help us to tide over the crisis and differentiate ourselves from competition.

Kersi Aspar (Yokogawa): As you know, we invest over 9 percent of sales revenue in research and development to develop technologies and automation solutions for the future. In the past few years, this industry has gone into the consolidation phase and now is left with less than 10 significant players. We continue to strive forward to keep up our leadership position through our vigilant attitude of "going the extra mile" and our customer-centric behavior.

Kersi Aspar (Yokogawa): We believe it is our "Vigilance" values of quality, innovation and foresight and "Customers' first" philosophy that have brought us to this leadership position. We will continue to keep up our commitment to serve customers. In closing, I would like to thank our customers who believed in us and to continue to depend on Yokogawa as their preferred supplier for automation needs.

Satish Lele (Frost & Sullivan): Thank you for your valuable time for this interview. Congratulations once again, for the achievements. We wish Yokogawa a successful year ahead.