ITOCHU Corporation (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Keita Ishii, President & COO; hereinafter “ITOCHU”) announced today that it has formed a capital and business alliance with Japan Best Rescue System Co., Ltd. (headquartered in Nagoya, Aichi; Nobuhiro Sakakibara, President and CEO; hereinafter “JBR”), which provides services to help resolve life issues and support people’s daily lives.

Recent developments such as the acceleration of digitization, including e-commerce, and a rapid increase in delivery services and telecommuting linked to the COVID-19 pandemic have brought significant changes to people’s living environment and habits. As a result, problems with housing facilities and digital devices such as PCs are increasingly diverse and complex. Meanwhile, in the domain of digital transformation, the development of new services is required to meet consumer needs on the actual front lines that cannot be completed with digitization alone.

With the corporate philosophy of “helping people in need,” JBR is one of the industry leaders, providing wide-ranging services to help solve problems in consumer life and membership and insurance services to support living security. JBR’s strength is to immediately dispatch personnel to homes having a problem across Japan to provide problem-solving support. The company has approximately 3,200 construction partners nationwide and provides services to approximately 4 million members.

Through this capital and business alliance, ITOCHU will support the expansion of JBR’s existing services and jointly develop new services using JBR’s problem-related data. The alliance will develop a broad array problem-solving support services related to consumer life and services to improve the quality of life, including healthcare, smartphones and IoT, as well as monitoring-related services, using the ITOCHU Group’s networks. These services will contribute to the improvement of companies’ points of direct contact with consumers and CRM by combining JBR’s value added services provided to, in particular, companies already offering member services or operating B-to-C businesses. In addition, ITOCHU will collect and use data related to problems arising in consumer life to develop new services.

ITOCHU transforms business through its "market-in" approach, which is a basic policy included its medium-term management plan, and this effort is in line with this policy. In the customer success segment, ITOCHU has been striving to improve customer support and satisfaction through business investment in and cooperation with BellSystem24 Holdings. Going forward, by providing new services from customers' perspective at all times, ITOCHU will continue to contribute to the solution of the declining birthrate and aging population and customers’ problems that arise in daily life, the outlook for which they tend to feel is uncertain.