Adjunct Professor Sachio Semmoto
Position
Adjunct Professor
Background
Dr Sachio Semmoto has had extensive industry and academic experience. He joined NTT to develop the first optical fiber system in Japan and led the development of the information Network System, the world's first digital service which embodied the ISDN concept. He was Japan 's official representative to the ITU on optical fiber and ISDN (1974-1980). He left NTT as General Manager to join Kyocera Corporation, Kyoto, Japan as Managing Director to co-found DDI Corporation (now KDDI), the first purely private telephone company. He played a major role in bringing it up to $5 billion in sales and $630 million in profit after 7 years of operation. DDI completed its Initial Public Offering at Tokyo Stock Exchange after 6 years of operation. This set a record as the fastest IPO in Japan. Dr Semmoto became a professor at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Keio University in the areas of entrepreneurial management and information technology. Dr Semmoto founded eAccess Ltd in November 1999. eAccess is Japan's first true entrepreneurial and global IP/telecom company that provides high-speed broadband telecommunication services using xDSL technology. After 5 years of operation, eAccess grew to a leading broadband IP operator in Japan, and it expects to enter into the mobile broadband market in 2006. eAccess completed its Initial Public Offering at the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers in October 2003 and moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange First Section (TSE1) in November 2004. This is considered to be the fastest listing in the TSE1 whose market capitalization is approximately US$1.5 billion.
Although he spent most of his career in the telecommunication industry, he also has a long history of academic involvement via extensive lecturing engagements at the world's leading universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and Northwestern in the United States and Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He was a visiting professor at the Carnegie Mellon University and at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and 2001 respectively, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Stanford University in 1997.
He serves on the board of several high technology companies outside Japan, including Network Appliance Inc. in the Silicon Valley and SmarTone Telecommunications Holdings Ltd in Hong Kong. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a trustee of the Tokyo Foundation and co-founded the Japan Academic Society for Ventures and Entrepreneurs, JASVE. Dr Semmoto has published numerous papers and books on both telecommunication technologies and high technology management.
He is a graduate of Kyoto University, Japan and received his MS and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida.