Mitsubishi Corporation (MC) and unerry, inc. (unerry) are pleased to announce the recent signing of their agreement to form a capital and business alliance. MC is one of Japan’s leading trading companies, while unerry owns Beacon Bank, one of Japan’s largest platforms for managing behavioral big data and mobility analytics. Their alliance will focus on the application of these data to pursue a variety of businesses that fall within the scope of MC’s urban-development and city-management (smart-city) operations.

 

The Beacon Bank platform takes advantage of small, wireless transmitters known as beacons to facilitate location-based searching and interaction. By analyzing the big data gathered through the platform and building its own behavior-forecasting model unerry also provides distributors and retailers with a range of services, including advertising, sales promotions and advice on maximizing the store-front customer experience. The company’s initiatives extend even further to making existing businesses IoT compatible and to constructing or providing advice on new business models. A particular focus has been on smart cities and the MaaS* industry, where unerry has been analyzing people’s movements throughout different regions and commercial facilities. Customers are provided with recommendations and other information on products and places that are tailored to their individual preferences.

*Mobility as a Service

 

MC has been actively pursuing smart-city developments in Japan and ASEAN. By partnering with unerry, the sogo shosha is hoping to leverage the latter’s abovementioned mobility-and-behavioral analytics to enhance the services available in those cities. One of the main objectives is to build comfortable urban environments by making them more convenient for both their inhabitants and visitors alike. This would be accomplished by using the data in a number of ways, such as to disseminate information based on people’s characteristics and preferences, or to visualize where and when city spaces are likely to become congested. In this fashion, MC is confident that it can help to realize a sustainable model for contemporary urban developments.     

 

Both unerry and MC are keen to grow their urban-development businesses in Japan and throughout ASEAN. Since 2016, the latter has been collaborating with one of Indonesia’s largest real-estate developers, Sinar Mas Land Ltd. (SML), for which it plans to offer solutions that could be applied to some of SML’s projects. Among them is the Bumi Serpong Damai smart-city project that covers roughly 6,000 hectares outside the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.  

 

Mitsumasa Icho

Executive Vice President

CEO, Urban Development Group

Mitsubishi Corporation

MC is engaged in a number of large-scale urban developments in Japan and ASEAN. Our company has a strategic approach to these projects that simultaneously incorporates both smart and digital technologies, the aims being to solve municipal challenges and help cities to grow sustainably. The core component of this capital and business alliance with unerry will be big data collected from urban environments, and our partnership will enable us to use those data to offer advanced solutions to our customers. I am confident that this will result in more accurate assessments of changing demand in regional communities, which should ultimately lead to more satisfied city dwellers, businesses and visitors.

   

Hidetoshi Uchiyama

President and CEO

unerry, Inc.

Here at unerry, our goal is a “real-world datafication,” through which we have helped to build resilient cities that are comfortable and easy to live in. In the regional retail space, we promote the advancement of OMO* communications and sales-promotion DX that understand the movements of consumers and visitors, while in the smart-city and MaaS industries, we perform quantitative, city-or-region-based assessments of mobility and transportation needs and provide behavioral recommendations to optimize the movement of people.

Through this capital and business alliance with MC, we will endeavor to address the societal challenges facing each city and region, create new social infrastructure capable of continuously generating value unique to those localities, and further urban development projects throughout ASEAN and other overseas markets. 

*Online-Merge-Offline (OMO) communications refers to all marketing communications designed to understand consumers’ online-and-offline shopping preferences and brand loyalties.

 

Headquarters:

2-3-1 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo

 

Main Operations:

MC engages in a wide range of businesses spanning multiple industries and overseen by its 10 Business Groups: Natural Gas, Industrial Materials, Petroleum & Chemicals, Mineral Resources, Industrial Infrastructure, Automotive & Mobility, Food Industry, Consumer Industry, Power Solution, and Urban Development.

 

Representative:

President and CEO Takehiko Kakiuchi

 

unerry, Inc.（https://www.unerry.co.jp/）

Headquarters:

21st floor, Marunouchi Nijubashi Building, 3-2-3 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo

 

Main Operations:

unerry operates Japan's largest real behavior data platform "Beacon Bank (https://www.beaconbank.jp/". unerry handles the information big data obtained through this platform and provides various high-value-added services.

 

Representative:

President and CEO Hidetoshi Uchiyama

 

Headquarters:

108 Pasir Panjang Road #06-00 Golden Agri Plaza Singapore, 118535

 

Main Operations:

Real estate development in Indonesia and overseas market.                

 

Representative:

Michael Widjaja, Group CEO