DIGI Hall of Fame SM-100 series, POS ECR WebPrime_S released Tesco selected DIGI checkout scale models in Poland and Central Europe High-Tech and High-Touch SM-880's transparent display type debut at Germany and Ukraine Prepack Scale Printer DPS-4600 launched in Danish market Teraoka celebrated 71st anniversary at a new facility   Mr. Con Kenny started his business career with DIGI as a top salesman of our first Irish distributor, Broderick Bros. When I speak about him, I have to remember the late Mr. Louis Kennedy, the managing director of Broderick Bros., who loved and brought up Con to be not only as a good salesman but also as an excellent businessman. As a matter of fact, the first plaque of DIGI Hall of Fame was sent to Mr. Kennedy in 1990 when he was struggling against cancer in a hospice. Con founded DIGI Systems Ltd. in Ireland in 1986 after the business turbulence of Beoderick Bros, and has suc-cessfully made DIGI as Number One in Ireland. Con actually once won the first place among all our DIGI family members around the world by the number units of DIGI sales per capita.   Our relationship with Mr. Peter Charagionis goes back to 1980. As he had never handled any weighing scales before, it was totally his new challenge to market DIGI in Greece. From the first day we met each other, Peter impressed all of us with his enthusiasm for the business. He aggressively started marketing DIGI from 1980, and within a short time succeeded in making DIGI Number One in Greece. Peter is not only a good businessman but also a water-skiing champion. He won the Senior's Nationals in 1993 and placed third in 1994. He is also a fanatic snow skier but without any competition history. I believe that his unyielding spirit displayed in the sport has contributed much to his success in the business. During those 25 years, both of us have together experienced not only a good time but also a very difficult and miserable time in our business. Peter has overcome even those hardships by his strong and positive mentality.   We established a joint venture called Essae Teraoka Private Limited in India together with Mr. S A Chandran in 1986. The success of this joint-venture company is absolutely outstanding. The company has been continuously expanding its operation and had to delete the word of "Private" from the company name in 1996 as the Indian legislation regards the company whose sales turnover exceeds one million Rupees for continuous three years not any more as "Private" but as the "public" company. Mr. Chandran is also a member of PHP Research Institute that the late Mr. Kounosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic and one of the most successful Japanese businessmen, established out of his ardent desire to achieve Peace and Happiness through Prosperity (PHP) by assuring both spiritual and material abundance. You might get a glimpse of his philosophy from his message below.   Written by Taka Hattori, International Sales Manager of Global Business Development Div. of Teraoka Seiko Co., Ltd. (Teraoka Japan) Cornelius C. Kenny, Managing Director of DIGI Systems Ltd. Con is a brilliant businessman, and a first-rate golf player. Cornelius C. Kenny   I am very proud to be included in the DIGI Hall of Fame and pay tribute to all the DIGI Family Members, past and present that have given me so many happy memories.   I thank them for their special friendships and their tremendous loyalty and support.   In autumn 1976, whilst selling mechanical Bizerba Scales for Broderick Bros, I met a handsome, young, energetic and extremely charming Japanese businessman called Taka Hattori who was in Ireland seeking a Distributor to sell DIGI Electronic Scales.   After official office discussions and demonstrations my late Boss, Louis Kennedy invited me to join him and Taka, where the Irish have for many generations successfully concluded business, "The Pub".   To this day I still remember quite clearly, Taka having the entire Irish Pub spellbound with his singing "Danny Boy". Taka's affiliation to Ireland and his warm, personal and caring attitude to our Irish Customers has flavoured and enhanced my own personal business acumen and also made a tremendous contribution to making DIGI Scales number one in Ireland.   This great market penetration/success in Ireland was instrumental in Taka and Teraoka Company inviting me to join DIGI Tour 1982, where I was very privileged and honoured to receive the DIGI Sales Award from the Past President, Mr. Takeharu Teraoka, which still hangs in my office today.   I also met President Kazuharu Teraoka and over many days of discussions marvelled at his dedicated commitment to create and develop new Technologies to facilitate and support DIGI Distributors to continue to grow and expand their businesses.   It took me quite some years to fully appreciate the wonderful creative business culture and philosophy of President Kazuharu when with unrelenting patience he continually shared with The DIGI Family the concept where to be really successful you must,   "Bake your own Pie, do not always look to share someone else's."   With this futuristic market strategy Teraoka Company has continued to capture world market share and their totally unselfish supportive relationships with their Distributors both technical and financial is unparalleled anywhere in the globe.   DIGI Systems Ireland continues to grow and develop its Teraoka business now under the stewardship of my son, Mark and I take this opportunity of thanking all the DIGI Family Members for assisting and supporting him, he really appreciates it.   I am very confident that Teraoka's dedication to futuristic product creations, "New Pie's" will be advantageous to all DIGI Distributors Worldwide and is much needed and appreciated by us all in today's Global competitive market place   Next Year, 2006 God willing I will celebrate 30 years association with Teraoka and I continually acknowledge the special individual friendships too numerous to note that have made each and every year even more memorable than the previous. Taka thank you once again for the honour to be included into the DIGI Hall of Fame Peter Charagionis, Managing Director of Chronografiki S.A. Peter is a strict tastier of wine, often matching or exceeding his enthusiasm for business. Peter Charagionis   Looking back in the last 25 years I see Teraoka playing the major roll in my life. And I consider the success of the cooperation between our companies as my biggest achievement.   It all started back in 1980. Chronografiki, an Attendance Time Systems Company, was found with excess capital which we decided to invest in a new and innovative business.   A number of ideas were investigated and we decided to go for electronic weighing, as it was a quite new idea for our country at the time.   Since we had business contacts with Japan already, we decided to look there for the suitable partner and we ended up with DIGI.   After exchanging some letters and buying the first samples, my first trip to Tokyo was arranged to finalize the deal.   There I met the heads of the Export Department, Kazuharu Teraoka, Taka Hattori and Hiro Nakazato. I will never forget what happened then!   Taka worked his magic and a few minutes later I found myself touring the offices and factory with a metal rod hanging by an elastic band from a buttonhole of my jacket, which I could not remove! I could sense the smiles of the DIGI employees who knew of course whose idea it was!   It took some talking to convince Kazuharu and Taka to trust the future of DIGI in Greece to a company with no previous experience in weighing but at the end of the day we had an agreement.   And it worked and it is still working!   Very quickly we climbed to the number one spot in our market where we remain since then. Our market share with system scales is steadily over 80% in the last 20 years, with our share in other sectors, regularly over 50%.   In fact it gives us great pride the remark that an old DIGI family member made when he visited our country that "Greece is a DIGI land!".   It was not always only roses, though.   Over the years many reputable competitors tried to clinch what they thought as a market share they deserved. Many failed completely and abandoned the Greek market. Others are still trying!�c.   Globalization has also changed the terms of the game dramatically over the recent years. But DIGI is solidly on top in Greece, and we intend to keep it there!   We can now reveal the secret of this long and harmonious cooperation:   Kazuharu Teraoka proved a great and constant source of inspiration for me over all these years and in many occasions I felt the need to fly to Tokyo to meet him in order to recharge my batteries with new ideas and new enthusiasm. And I always tried to transplant to my business the philosophy of Teraoka as I understand it: The drive to be innovative, the ambition to be on top, the initiative to "bake our own pie".     To the above we added our personal touches.     -Do not let the competitors gain any strength. Push them out while they are new and weak.     -Make yourself indispensable to your customer. Make him feel that any other choice than you, is a compromise. Even better, make him feel he has no other choice!   Over these years I was blessed with the friendship of some remarkable people: Kazuharu Teraoka of course and the unique Taka Hattori, but also Hiro Nakazato, Shi Guo Xing, Ikuo Harashima, to name but a few.   It is a great honor to be invited to occupy this space of the DIGI News Bulletin on the occasion of our first 25 years of business. I feel grateful and privileged. And I can only say that I will continue my efforts so that I will be here again when Teraoka and Chronografiki celebrate the first 50 years of cooperation in 2030!! S A Chandran, Chairman- Emeritus of Essae-Teraoka Ltd. S A Chandran   My thanks to Teraoka/DIGI for inducting me into the "DIGI Hall of Fame". It gives me immense pride and honour to be part of such an elite & distinguished group of DIGI family members. Before I share my early experiences with Teraoka/DIGI, I would first like to share the vision of Essae group which is:   "To share the wisdom and wealth for the welfare of external and internal customers, business associates and society at large"   Driven by this vision, I started my own business in 1965. I am a strong believer that Character and Competence is equally required and one without the other is not useful. The person who "Values the values" like Honesty, Hard work, Integrity, Empathy etc will definitely have the pride to make and sell a good product/service. This is the fundamental principle on which I started the industry with a meager capital, tremendous enthusiasm and commitment.   Everybody is born into this world as a debtor and consumes the wealth of Society. Unless we give back to the society in some form, we will die as a debtor. With this idea, I was looking for a product, which will be commercially viable and also useful to the society.   We finally selected Electronic weighing scale as our new product where the customer/consumer can get their products accurately weighed. When we started in 1986, there was a lot of cheating by many traders due to outdated mechanical Scales and there was a lot of resistance from them to switch to an Electronic scale. Due to bad experience with electronic products earlier, many customers were very skeptical and cynical about the Quality and after-sales service of electronic products in general. Looking back, it has paid us rich dividends by initially focusing and investing heavily on quality and after-sales service.   Before we approached Teraoka Seiko, we looked at several other manufacturers in Europe. I did a lot of study in the global scale market. However, finally I was strongly convinced that Japanese manufacturers have the ability to offer a very high quality product at a competitive price, which was very important in the Indian context.   The relationship between Essae and Teraoka is very unique because we started out as a joint venture with investment in capital and technology rather than as a distributor. Ours was and still is the only Indo-Japanese joint venture manufacturing scales in India. This was because of the high customs duty at that time and the extremely price sensitive nature of the market. We wanted to gradually reduce our manufacturing costs by value engineering the design and leveraging on the local supply base. We would not have been successful today had we started only by distributing the products. The reaction to a joint venture proposal from everybody including Teraoka Seiko was initially negative.   Every manufacturer including Teraoka was interested only to have a Distributor and not a joint venture. I also wanted to give up the idea of Electronic Weighing Scale, because I was not interested to become only a distributor since that business model will not work in the Indian context. I visited Japan 5times before I could meet Mr. Kazuharu Teraoka and finally when we met, he was not very convinced that Essae could sell scales because we had no marketing experience and knew only manufacturing. After a lot of discussions he was able to sense my enthusiasm, perseverance and commitment and we finally agreed to sign the joint venture.   One of the reasons for me to be keen to have collaboration with Teraoka was their high product Quality, market share in Japan and their professional and positive approach. After we started, initially there were plenty of teething problems due to specification changes on platform sizes and others which needed design modifications to suit the Indian market. However, jointly we successfully crossed all those hurdles. We worked together in an environment of TOTAL trust and WIN-WIN approach, which I think is very important for any partnership to succeed in the long term.   I must thank Mr. Takeharu Teraoka, Mr. Kazuharu Teraoka, Mr. Mitsunori Nakamura, Mr. Kimiyuki Takano and Mr. Taka Hattori fortheir support and co-operation in the early years without which we could not have started off successfully. Later on, Mr. Takashi Katayama and Mr. Akihiko Kuroiwa from Teraoka Singapore played an important role, which helped us to grow more rapidly. All of them were very able to quickly sense and understand the ground realities in the Indian market and take suitable decisions.   If there is anything important I have learnt from our relationship, it is the business approach to think everything and transact with everyone in a long term and mutually beneficial way.   I see many old time DIGI family members who keep coming back to every world meeting with a lot of enthusiasm to share their success stories. We constantly try to emulate this Quality with all our stakeholders.   After 19 years, I look back with a lot of satisfaction and pride that our relationship with Teraoka/DIGI has been and continues to be very successful. We now have our own R&D to customize our products for the Indian market. We are also proud to export many products to the global market under the DIGI/Teraoka brand.   I have learnt from experience that having the right product alone is not enough. Building and developing a good team of people is more important. I must recall the contribution of Mr. S A Venkatesan and Mr. V Hariharan, especially during the initial stages. The contribution and commitment of Mr. N Bhaskar and Mr. P C Singhvi over the last two decades has been very valuable. In addition, it is important for me to recognize the contribution of a host of other senior executives at Essae and all our stakeholders like customers, employees, vendors, business partners and shareholders.   Today with 2 manufacturing plants, 61 branches, over 200 dealers and a large satisfied customer base, Essae-Teraoka is the un-disputed market leader in India. Full credit to the wonderful team at Essae & Teraoka/DIGI.