Strategy / Medium-to-Long Term Management Policy
Our business environment
Japan is facing a declining labor force, which has intensified competition for recruitment across industries. As a result, wage levels continue to rise, and securing human resources is becoming increasingly difficult year by year.
This trend has had a significant impact on the temporary staffing industry as well. As job seekers now have more options, staffing agencies are being forced to continuously raise wages to attract temporary staff. At the same time, recruitment advertising costs are also escalating.
Consequently, profit margins for staffing companies are under considerable pressure, and even among major firms, some are reporting losses.
Combined with the forecasted future labor shortages, we believe this trend could accelerate, potentially rendering the traditional Japanese staffing model unsustainable.
We also view the increasing shift among industry peers toward diversifying into areas such as recruitment placement, outsourcing services, and job advertising—as opposed to relying solely on temporary staffing—as an early sign of this structural change.
The CRO (Contract Research Organization) industry is not immune to these challenges.
As long as operations continue to depend heavily on manual labor, rising wage levels will inevitably erode profitability.
Furthermore, the rapid advancement of technologies such as generative AI is likely to accelerate the automation of routine tasks. As a result, there is growing pressure to reconsider business operations that depend on outsourcing. Across the industry, there is a clear need to redefine the value we provide and transform the structure of our business models.
In response to these shifts, we are advancing our business based on the following strategies.
Mid- to long-term strategy
Pursuit of value as a staffing agency
As a company specializing in the temporary staffing of science engineers and researchers, the WDB Group maintains relatively high-profit margins compared to staffing agencies that handle general occupations.
Leveraging this strength, in the medium term we will continue to increase compensation for temporary workers, as well as provide a full-time temporary employment system that does not involve relocation and strengthen our sales structure to provide a wider range of work that meets the needs of job seekers. These efforts are intended to increase our appeal to new job seekers and improve our capacity to promptly provide new assignments to existing staff when their current contracts end, thereby promoting continued employment.
In May 2025, we launched doco1, a staffing service platform that allows clients to place staffing orders with multiple staffing agencies simultaneously and enables centralized management such as attendance tracking and invoicing after contract signing.
We will also pursue a new approach to customer acquisition by starting relationships through the use of “doco1” and building trust that leads to receiving staffing orders.
Over the long term, our goal is to maximize two core values of a staffing agency: matching job seekers with client companies and supporting staff throughout their assignments.
The WDB Group already possesses unique strengths in both areas, but by further evolving our platform, we will further automate the process, reduce intermediation costs, and continue to increase the compensation of staffing staff. In addition, by further refining our careful follow-up during employment, even if the market environment becomes even more severe and other companies are forced to switch to new businesses, we will continue our business as a staffing company by being supported by clients and staffing staff.
In doing so, we believe that the current intense competition will subside, and it will become possible to establish a new business model that ensures high profitability.
Transformation into a platform-based business
Since 2016, the WDB Group has been striving to transform ourselves into a platform-based business company, and as a result of these efforts, we have launched several digital platforms: “doconico” and “doco1” for digitalizing staffing services, and “CoCoPos” for CRO services.
Our next goal is to create a new platform that offers services beyond staffing.
Through the development and operation of doconico and doco1, we have accumulated extensive expertise in platform management. Drawing on this experience, we are currently working toward the launch of a new service platform within the next few years.
CRO business
The CRO business is based on four areas: safety information management support, document support, PMS support, and clinical research support, and has built a flexible system that can respond immediately to the needs of pharmaceutical companies and changes in the market. In the medium to long term, it is expected that manual routine tasks will be rapidly replaced due to advances in generative AI and automation technology. We will face this structural change head-on and continue to promote the standardization and automation of processes, as well as the strengthening of center operations that balance the stability and efficiency of operations. On top of that, we will establish a new CRO model that coexists with AI by concentrating resources on practical value areas that should be handled by humans, such as business judgment, customer service, quality assurance, and multitasking. In the areas of document support, PMS support, and clinical research support, we will standardize operations, introduce tools, and digitalize processes to improve reproducibility and productivity.
In the field of advanced medical devices, where domestic demand is expected to grow in the future, we aim to evolve into a system capable of providing comprehensive support for business expansion both in Japan and overseas. This will be achieved through an integrated support system that spans from development to regulatory registration and post-marketing activities, leveraging digital technologies and data, and in collaboration with overseas group companies.
In addition, in the medium to long term, we will work to create new businesses in the medical and pharmaceutical fields. To address the fragmented practical issues that existing services are unable to address, we will build a support model that is tailored to the actual situation on the ground by combining digital technology, and aim to provide new value that combines high expertise and profitability in specific fields.
In the medium term, we will use platforms and AI to improve work efficiency and improve employee treatment, while minimizing the impact on short-term profits and expanding our business. Furthermore, while low profitability had been a challenge in our overseas CRO operations, we took steps to improve profitability in February 2025 by divesting unprofitable businesses.
More detailed information on these initiatives can be found in our Medium-to-Long Term Management Policy.
About WDB Holdings
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