Takayuki Morita
President and Chief Executive Officer
2021 – Present
5 years (current)
Key Decisions & Impact
Morita became NEC's president and CEO on April 1, 2021, and has directed the company's shift toward digital government, biometric security, and enterprise AI services under NEC's 'BluStellar' value-creation strategy, prioritizing higher-margin software and services over legacy hardware businesses. He has continued NEC's international expansion in financial and public-sector software following the Avaloq and Northgate acquisitions completed in the years before his appointment.
Legacy
His tenure has focused on repositioning NEC away from its historical dependence on domestic telecom-equipment and PC hardware sales toward recurring software, cybersecurity, and biometric-identification revenue, an area where NEC has long-standing technology but historically weaker global brand recognition than Western competitors. He has also expanded NEC's biometric and facial-recognition technology sales to law-enforcement and border-security customers internationally, an area where NEC has ranked among global leaders in independent accuracy benchmarks for years, even though the broader NEC brand remains far less recognized outside Japan than its underlying technology performance would suggest. He has framed NEC's overseas software acquisitions and biometric-technology exports as central to reversing decades of the company's declining relevance outside Japan, a turnaround effort that depends on convincing Western enterprise and government customers to trust a Japanese vendor over entrenched US and European incumbents in security-sensitive categories like digital identity and financial software.