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' options have expanded, 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 have begun to fall into the red.
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 put pressure on profit margins.
Moreover, advances in technologies such as generative AI are driving the automation of operations, while shifts toward operating models that do not rely on outsourcing are already emerging among leading pharmaceutical companies. In this changing environment, addressing rising costs requires transforming business structures through the standardization of operations and reducing reliance on individuals, as well as fundamentally reassessing the value delivered as a CRO.
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
In the medium term, by delivering services through our platforms, we will automate the intermediation process between job seekers and employers, minimizing— to the fullest extent possible—tasks that have traditionally been performed by people, and reducing SG&A expenses. We will reinvest these cost savings into compensation for temporary staff, improving their working conditions and aiming to become the highest-paying staffing company in the industry.
For tasks that require human involvement, we will further strengthen our sales, talent selection, and follow-up capabilities to increase order volume, improve order fulfillment rates, and reduce turnover of temporary staff. In our permanent employment–based staffing services, we will also expand region-specific hiring without relocation across Japan, while strengthening mid-career recruitment to significantly enhance our talent acquisition capabilities.
In addition, we launched “Doco1” in May 2025, an integrated staffing platform that enables clients to place orders with multiple staffing agencies simultaneously and centrally manage attendance and billing operations after contract execution. Adoption among clients has been steadily increasing. Leveraging doco1 as a foundation, we will develop new client relationships and expand our customer base, establishing a model for acquiring staffing orders through platform-driven engagement.
In the long term, the market environment is expected to become increasingly challenging, making it difficult for staffing companies to sustain profitability. In response, we will further advance our platform and automate intermediation to the fullest extent possible, thereby reducing SG&A expenses to the minimum. We will reinvest the resulting cost savings to raise compensation for temporary staff to levels that competitors cannot match, enabling us to secure a large pool of talent from the labor market and place them in temporary assignments.
At the same time, by combining our long-standing strength in ongoing support during assignments with digitized intermediation and administrative functions, we will earn the trust of both clients and workers, positioning ourselves as one of the few staffing companies capable of sustaining high profitability.
In addition, through our proprietary “centralized staffing agency management system,” we will expand our presence beyond the research staffing segment and position ourselves for renewed growth within the staffing market.
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.
Through the development and operation of these services, we have accumulated expertise as a platform operator. We are now developing platforms that will further strengthen our staffing services, as well as new platforms that deliver services beyond staffing. We are currently advancing development with the aim of launching these services within the next one to two years.
CRO business
The CRO business is based on five areas: safety information management support, post-marketing surveillance (PMS) support, clinical research support, medical device development support, and document 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 particular, in document support, PMS support, and clinical research support, we will standardize operations, introduce AI-powered document drafting support tools, and digitize processes to improve reproducibility and productivity.
In the field of advanced medical devices, where domestic demand is expected to grow in the future, we will build on a support framework that comprehensively covers the entire process from development and regulatory registration to post-marketing activities, while integrating digital technologies and data. In collaboration with our overseas group companies, we will further evolve this into a system capable of providing multifaceted support for business expansion both in Japan and internationally.
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 by divesting unprofitable businesses.
More detailed information on these initiatives can be found in our Medium-to-Long Term Management Policy.
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.