Announcement of Capital & Business Partnership Between NGK SPARK PLUG & Uhuru for Collaboration in New Businesses including Land-based Seafood Aquaculture

Uhuru Corporation (“Uhuru”, headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo, President & CEO: Takashi Sonoda) has entered into capital and business partnership with NGK SPARK PLUG CO., LTD. (“NGK SPARK PLUG”, headquarters: Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Representative Director & Chairman of the board: Shinichi Odo) as of January 23, 2019.

1. Purpose of the Capital and Business Partnership

NGK SPARK PLUG provides various products utilizing core technologies in ceramics lamination technology and sensing technology, such as spark plugs for automobile engines and exhaust gas oxygen concentration sensors. In recent years NGK SPARK PLUG has also been branching out into new areas, such as medical, environmental & energy and next-generation automotive.

Since 2015, Uhuru has been increasingly focusing on its IoT business – creating applications and solutions for our customers, simplifying data utilization to seamlessly integrate systems – contributing to ongoing efforts to promote digital transformation in enterprise and throughout society.

NGK SPARK PLUG, with its cutting-edge sensor technology, and Uhuru, with its expertise in IoT, AI and data trading businesses, have joined hands to bring together co-creation partners from all kinds of industries and lines of business to overcome the myriad challenges currently faced by society, with the aim of contributing to the further development of society by making innovation happen.

2. Substance of the Business Alliance

Main substance of the business alliance is as follows.
(1) Solution Planning
Combining products and services from both parties to develop new feasible solutions
(2) Establish a Business Ecosystem
Formulate co-creation partner models and an ecosystem around the collaboration and peripheral domains
(3) Joint Efforts in PR and Marketing
Joint planning and implementation of PR activities, events for partners and seminars targeting the market

3. Outlook

The first step of the joint business is land-based seafood aquaculture. Although global consumption of seafood is increasing, the amount of fish in the wild is decreasing, and thus it is hard to imagine that the volume of catches by fisheries will grow. While it is certain that the global seafood industry will trend toward aquafarming, suitable domestic marine sites for aquaculture are becoming scarce. This has given rise to an interest in land-based aquaculture.

That being said, one issue with land-based aquaculture is its costliness compared to marine-based aquaculture. NGK SPARK PLUG, with its forte in sensor technology, and Uhuru, with its expertise in IoT and AI, will collaborate with partners beyond their traditional industry boundaries to solve the various issues surrounding land-based aquaculture.

The fact that it is far easier to manage the farmed seafood value chain, from hatchling to market, gives it an advantage over wild-caught seafood, allowing producers to provide safe aquaculture products. Unfortunately, many consumers still have the perception that wild-caught seafood is safer than farmed. Looking ahead, we plan to use the data collected by the aquaculture systems in combination with distributed ledger (Blockchain) technology to trade data in a form that is tamper-proof to establish the world’s first traceability solution to bring added value to farmed seafood. Furthermore, by coupling existing data with AI, we will tackle many of the challenges facing aquaculture.

*Names of companies, products and services contained in this news release are trademarks or registered trademarks of Uhuru or the respective companies and organizations.

About NGK SPARK PLUG CO., LTD.

NGK SPARK PLUG CO., LTD., headquartered in Nagoya, Japan, is a comprehensive ceramics processing manufacturer. We hold a world leading share of spark plugs and automotive sensors for internal combustion engines and also offer a broad lineup of semiconductor packages, cutting tools, bio ceramics and industrial ceramics. Our global network of sales and manufacturing organizations with over 15,000 employees offer value creation to the world. We are now contributing to a sustainable society by developing products related to the environment energy, next generation vehicles and the medical field.

About Uhuru Corporation

Uhuru’s corporate philosophy is to “Create the future with technology and out of the box thinking”. We aspire to contribute to our clients and society by bringing added value with innovative products and services based on the Internet. Focusing on IoT business, we continue to make transformation happen at our clients with enebular, our IoT orchestration service that allows unified management of edge devices and the cloud. We are also working on next-generation telecommunications technologies including NB-IoT in preparation for the upcoming era of 5G. Our teams of experts in consulting, engineering and creative production strive to create business at our clients by offering one-stop access to professional services and business strategy, technological support and communication strategy.