Market Update

If you feel anything like I do, you must be looking forward to spring, but this year is definitely different. Normally we'd all be having hanami parties, but this year everything is dominated by social distancing, self quarantine, and the root of all of these sudden changes, Covid-19.

While many parts of the world are struggling to deal with the virus, Japan has managed to keep business going despite the extraordinary challenges facing us. Even with the recent escalation in cases and the state of emergency declaration in 7 prefectures, people have been incredibly resilient. Not to say there haven't been changes, as practices like remote work, flexible working hours, and video interviews are now the new normal.

What concerns most of us, outside the immediate safety of our friends and family, are the economic implications brought on by the virus. In order to get a better idea of how our clients are responding, we conducted an informal survey to better understand what's happening here in Japan. The results were interesting and worth sharing.

About 55% are still hiring, with a majority saying that Covid-19 has had little to no impact on their growth plans. This sentiment seems particularly strong when it comes to product-related hires, as deadlines need to be met for product launches. Conversely, about 28% of companies have temporarily stopped hiring due to the virus, and another 17% aren't hiring now for unrelated reasons.

These results were collected primarily from startups, both international and domestic, throughout the last few weeks. Although things are changing daily, they do provide some insight into how companies are handling the global crisis locally.

As always, we're happy to share our market information with clients, so we also collected industry insights from our leading recruiters for you below.

If you are interested in speaking to someone at Wahl+Case about market information or trends, please reach out (but wash your hands first).

Chad Lafferty
Managing Director

chad@wahlandcase.com
LinkedIn

Industry Insights

Consumer Technology

Our area of coverage is broad, so reaction to the Coronavirus has been varied. In industries related to travel, such as OTA companies, airlines and metasearch booking platforms, there has been a postponement of hiring; these headcounts have not been cancelled however, and have been pushed back to May or June.

Industries that have been least impacted in the B2C sector are digital entertainment platforms (VOD, online gaming/Esports) and E-Commerce: while it is too early to see the situation leading to more hiring, it is certainly business-as-usual in terms of ongoing hiring. Interestingly, these are also the companies that typically have already established remote working policies too. We are continuing to work on staff level positions up to Director and Country Manager roles with the only change being a preference for video interviews.

FinTech

Mobile payments and payment gateway companies have been consistently hiring throughout Q1, particularly for junior to mid-career positions in sales and coordination. Foreign companies looking to establish their Japan business have been undeterred by the Coronavirus and we have successfully placed several professionals into SMBs as Japan shifts away from a cash-centric economy.

We anticipate growth for companies that provide online solutions for things like credit checks, loans and peer-to-peer money transfers, but this is more as a result of market trends that existed in spite of the Coronavirus rather than because of it.

Enterprise Technology / Advertising Technology

For B2B, we've noticed a drop in the amount of marketers being hired, but sales people at all levels are still in demand. Marketing and advertising agencies do seem to be slowing down, likely as a result of companies spending more cautiously given global economic uncertainty.

Technical Side

For developers, engineers, designers, product-oriented positions, 3rd party and project based development roles we are seeing about 5% of the positions being on hold and another 20% being slowed down but still moving forward.

Most of the domestic companies are still actively hiring especially in E-Commerce, Mobile Gaming, Healthtech, IoT and general consumer technologies.

Client-facing Technical Roles

Roughly 10% of foreign companies decided to stop hiring for now. Most of them are from Fin-Tech or travel-related industries.

On the other hand, IT consulting, consulting in general and Japanese domestic companies are still hiring. The opensource community and data companies are also still active.