More than 16,000 attendees, 700 journalists, 350 speakers from over 100 countries, gathered in Hong Kong July 9-11 for Asia’s largest technology conference, RISE. Besides application and software developers, cosmetic giant Shiseido was also at the event, which surprised many.

With a video showing the company’s upcoming products, such as a bracelet providing an ultraviolet body shield and colourchanging fingernails, Masahiko Uotani, president of Shiseido, proved at a session called Shiseido’s digital makeover that his presence was no accident. Uotani said that his company’s breakthroughs are already in the research and development stage across three innovation hubs in China, Japan and the United States.

Uotani also shared what he had brought to the company when he was first asked to join.

“I’d decided to retire and play golf everyday but when I got the call to lead Shiseido, I was thinking ‘Well, it was a great global brand and I have a chance to save it from declining sales, so why not give it a shot before I really retire!’” he laughed.

He has not only saved the company’s sales but increased its value, both fiscally and figuratively to the brand by overhauling its corporate culture.

“One of the weakest links for a Japanese company is English, so from 2018, it has become the common language in our headquarters,” he said. “Changing the culture of a 147-year-old Japanese company is very difficult and one of the first things I tackled when I came onboard was breaking hierarchy and encouraging empowerment. We hire CEOs in different regions and they are very autonomous, since they’re the ones running the business for us.

“We have also increased female positions by 30 percent in Japan and are growing to 40 percent by 2020,” he said. “With our technology advancement and change of culture, we managed to meet 2020’s sales target back in 2017.”

If anyone wants to be as successful as he is, he reminded the audience that leaders must make a commitment to change themselves before asking others to do so.

Despite the good news from Shiseido, Thuan Pham, chief technology officer of Uber, delivered some “bad” news.

“There are no driverless cars in the near future,” Pham said at Uber’s road ahead. “The biggest hurdle is the software.”

While Uber is seen almost everywhere, its financial health is not as strong as you might expect.

“After we went public, we were striving to be profitable in a few years, because that’s the only way to sustain a business,” Pham said. “One way to invert the current status of the company is to improve our customer experience by decreasing a second of the pickup time in each ride. Don’t underestimate that second, because if riders find it convenient, they will use us more often.”

Besides improving existing services, Uber is also launching new ones.

“We’re also launching bus service in some markets, because competition in the logistics industry is vigorous and we are trying hard to compete,” said Pham.

So how much of a dollar can Uber make per transaction in either car or bus? “It’s hard to say, because the profit margin per transaction is small – we must therefore focus on the volume of sales, which is somewhat similar to Amazon’s business model,” he said.

To close the session, he said that products and services must be able to solve problems. “Don’t develop anything for the sake of it! Remember when you are a startup, you are small so don’t be afraid to make mistakes.”

RISE will return to Hong Kong in 2020.

Johnny Chan