Interview with Nissan Chemical: Keeping the top level of customer satisfaction

Nissan Chemical Industries’ agricultural-chemicals business has been a consistent sales engine for the company. Kiminori Hirata, its managing director in charge of the business, told JCWeb that farmers are aging and the country’s cultivated acreage is declining but per capita cultivated acreage is rising, so the company is concentrating on developing products that will streamline agricultural work and lessen labor.

Would you give us a picture of the business?

I am proud to say that we have a business that is well balanced, including in the relationships among our R&D, production and sales divisions, in our portfolio of product, and in our sales composition. We are trying to improve our sales and dissemination of our technologies by introducing third-party evaluation for enhanced customer satisfaction. We are maintaining the top level of customer satisfaction in the industry, and I think the effort won’t end.

How was the company’s performance last year?

Our performance was pulled down in fiscal 2010 by reduced inventory of Roundup herbicide, but we got boosts from our licensing revenue from animal drugs and sales of thifluzamide bactericide, which we acquired from Dow AgroSciences, resulting in sales and profit increases.

What are this year’s new products?

Our new agricultural products are Getstar, a paddy herbicide, Oracle, a clubroot bactericide, Vortex FS, a seed treatment agent, Bangbang, a wheat herbicide, and Widecoat, a spreading agent. We have high expectations for Getstar, a formulation with active ingredients from other companies, as a product that can answer user needs for pesticide reduction. For household use, we launched Roundup Maxload, which can be used without diluting. The market for household-use herbicide is too large to ignore, and the call for functions is also rising. We plan to promote our herbicide until we have reached every household, using the global brand name.

How is the R&D of new products going?

We are developing our NC-620 paddy herbicide, a successor product to our current paddy herbicide, aiming for a market launch in 2013 and peak annual sales of 6 bn yen ($75mn). We are preparing to register it in South Korea as a pesticide and will start sales there. We also have insecticides for fruit and vegetable cultivation and another paddy herbicide, other than NC-620, in our pipeline.

Agrochemical companies have been activating their global development.

Our overseas sales now comprise about 20% of our total sales. We intend to raise this to 25% in fiscal 2015, the final year of our Vista 2015 medium-term management plan. To achieve the goal, expansion of our sales network is necessary. We plan to use the sales routes of multinational companies in Europe and the US, local manufactures and trading companies, according to the specific product and region. Sun Star Industries, our group company in India, is selling our herbicide for upland crop. We are considering the launch of our paddy herbicide. We want to use our strategic products, like Targa, Sirius, thifluzamide and Permit herbicide, to grow our sales in emerging markets. Although competition with generics is anticipated, we will differentiate our products by having blends of high-added-value ingredients.

Source: JCWeb