Hitachi has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of booming demand for artificial intelligence and clean energy — soaring into the top five of Japan’s most valuable companies after a deep corporate overhaul.The 114-year old manufacturing conglomerate has rewarded investors for backing its transformation into an industrial software and hardware provider, with its market capitalisation trebling in the past two years to more than $100bn.
It will make up 41 per cent of core earnings this year despite only being set up in 2016. Pelham Smithers, an independent analyst, said that Hitachi’s turnaround had been “remarkable” but the changes went beyond the “peeling of the onion” by selling divisions, with Lumada developed so it could bring data analysis to traditionally analogue realms. “The likes of Tesla and Microsoft have evangelised monetising data.