Intensive negotiations and advocacy work paid off – Sensire’s intelligent cold chain goes global

When Yokogawa Electric Corporation invested 6 million euro in Sensire, the collaboration in the intelligent cold chain began. Sensire is known for easy-to-use solutions for environmental conditions monitoring based on IoT technology.

Big investment decisions typically are the end result of two parallel processes, the efforts of the company and Business Finland with Team Finland partners. In the Sensire case, the Embassy of Finland and Invest in Finland provided Yokogawa Electric Corporation with information about the Finnish business environment. Several managers from Yokogawa Electric Corporation visited Team Finland members in Tokyo, Japan, in November 2018. At that time the negotiations with Sensire were going on, but nothing was public.

”The Sensire delegation was interested in investment opportunities in Finland and wanted to learn more. We talked about the hot startups and innovations, benefits of doing business in Finland and working culture,” says Eiji Atsumi, Senior Advisor of Business Finland in Tokyo.

Atsumi adds that business negotiations with Japanese companies typically take long, because careful evaluation is valued.

Intensive advocacy work

Since the visit, Yokogawa Electric Corporation has been invited to events organized by the Embassy of Finland in Tokyo. The events have ranged from an Invest in Finland seminar presenting the Finnish startup ecosystem and sharing experiences of Japanese investments in Finland to a Finnish digital health promotion seminar. The latter interests Japanese investors, who are keen on health tech in B2B. It is a high margin business, and in an ageing society health is on top of the agenda.

Atsumi highlights that these gatherings are a great way to tell Japanese investors about the opportunities in Finland and to increase their interest.

”A Japanese investment decision to a Finnish company always involves many stakeholders in the investor company, especially if Finland is a new country to them. It is important to involve also those stakeholders, who are not directly involved in the investment. The more people know about Finland, the more confident they become, and this will speed up decision-making. In the Sensire case, our efforts seems to have paid off,” says Atsumi.

Common goals

The same year Yokogawa Electric Corporation visited the embassy, the company and Sensire had started to negotiate. Yokogawa Electric Corporation had become interested in the company as Sensire had ”all of the blocks” to scale-up internationally, but a lack of funding.

The company had an experienced serial entrepreneur as CEO, processes functioned, and a distribution network in Germany was under development. Over the years, the company has developed its solutions patiently and also with the support of Business Finland.

Some of Sensire’s solutions ensure food safety and quality in kitchens, catering and other facilities. The client gets real-time data from the cloud and can easily monitor the temperatures, but most importantly, record food safety tasks and follow-up processes to decrease waste. This is the key – an intelligent cold chain.

Other solutions help in warehousing and transportation in pharmaceutical logistics, climate-sensitive healthcare premises and many more. For example, in transportation the client gets data about the temperatures to ensure correct conditions in various transportation phases and up-to-date info of shipped products. It is crucial when regulatory products such as blood and tissues are on the move.

When the contact from Yokogawa Electric Corporation came, JP Asikainen, CEO of Sensire, was hit with surprise. The Development Director responsible for European Business would like to meet Asikainen in Joensuu, Finland and this happened soon.

”We negotiated for a couple of days, and I started to understand that the company is interested in us for real. They had been looking for a company at our maturity level,” says Asikainen.

Traditionally, Yokogawa Electric Corporation has an industrial automation business providing products, services and solutions to the oil and chemicals industries to name a few. The new goal includes expansion to the pharmaceutical and food industries with a partner.

After hundreds of questions and answers, things culminated and Yokogawa Electric Corporation invested 6 million euro in Sensire in 2019.

Distribution network to 60 countries

The collaboration of Sensire and Yokogawa Electric Corporation has moved on rapidly. Honesty as a common value and high goals give a great basis to develop new solutions for the cold chain and other logistics services together.

The companies’ common expertise includes Yokogawa's Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) architecture, subscription-based IIoT services developed by its amnimo Inc. subsidiary, and Sensire's cold chain monitoring solutions.

”With the help of Yokogawa, we already have a distribution network in 60 European and APAC countries, and can focus to develop the next generation cloud architecture,” says Asikainen.

New things seem to emerge. The company has just announced that their IoT sensor platform can communicate data directly to the SAP Cloud Platform.

For more information, please contact

Eiji Atsumi, Senior Advisor
eiji.atsumi (at) businessfinland.fi
tel. +81 3 6432 5276