Big rounds of tech job cuts are providing Hitachi with an opportunity with the Japanese company going full throttle to grab the occasion.

The car company's desperation is said to have been spurred by a drive to sustain the business in the face of stiff competition from other electric vehicle companies. 

Sniffing out “a big opportunity”, the firm is also looking for acquisitions in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Chief Executive Keiji Kojima revealed his company's big-time hiring to the Financial Times. He said the fierce cost-cutting campaigns at Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and other US tech groups over the past year would help the industrial conglomerate as it goes on a multibillion-dollar recruitment spree to expand its digital services.

"We want to hire really good people among those who were let go," Kojima said, adding that the company needs to be selective since the salaries of these individuals are generally high.

He described it as “a big opportunity”. Kojima pointed out that the company was also actively hunting new acquisition targets in the US in cloud services, following its $9.5 billion purchase of GlobalLogic, a Silicon Valley software engineering company, in 2021.

Hitachi has set aside ¥500bn ($3.7bn) to invest in its digital strategy for the three years through March 2025 and plans to hire 30,000 digital personnel in that time. In addition to the two businesses it recently acquired in Romania and Uruguay, GlobalLogic already employs about 1,000 people per month, primarily in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Over a decade-long process saw the sprawling Japanese conglomerate transitioning into an IT and infrastructure specialist, merging and selling off 22 listed subsidiaries long considered sacred cows.

Hitachi bought GlobalLogic and expanded its software business Lumada with the money it received from selling non-core operations. Additionally, in 2020, it invested $6.4 billion to purchase a nearly 80% stake in ABB's power grid business, which it later fully acquired.

From this point forward, Kojima said, "We will be making investments to grow organically, but also including M&A to accelerate that growth.

The CEO of Hitachi claimed that due to the company's efforts at corporate restructuring, "the conglomerate discount," which is frequently applied to large, sprawling Japanese companies, had shrunk.

According to Kojima, the group planned to sell a stake to a global private equity fund in Hitachi Astemo, which was created through a landmark merger of car parts subsidiaries at Hitachi and Honda. 

After looking for a fund investor in fiscal 2023, the unit, of which Hitachi owns two-thirds, plans to list its shares in the next two to three years.

Kojima said the advent of electric cars around the world has made his firm realise that it will not be able to survive without further capital investment, research and development.