Yokogawa, a global leader in industrial automation - Interview with Norinao Sato

Yokogawa, a global leader in industrial automation with over a century of expertise, is transforming the energy sector. Known for cutting-edge solutions in oil, gas, and pipeline industries, the company combines innovation in IoT, AI, and robotics to enhance safety, efficiency, and proactive maintenance.
This exclusive interview with Pipeline Technology Journal, shares Yokogawa’s insights into the company’s vision, its strategic role in the Middle East’s pipeline projects, and how it’s shaping the future of energy through innovation.
Yokogawa is globally known. But some of our audience, still do not know your services. Can you tell me more about the history of the company and what you do? Where is your focus point?
Yokogawa was founded in 1915. So, we have more than 100 years of history. Our business is, in one word, IA (Industrial Automation).
We manufacture sensors, control systems, and now, visualization, mainly for oil and gas customers in this region, including pipeline companies, to control a plant and, of course, increase safety, and decrease risks, so that the customer can design products on time, on specifications.
How important is the innovation of visualization at Yokogawa to admit and adapt to the trend and rapid energy sector?
It's very important since it's getting very high because visualization actually covers a lot of things. For example, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), and, now there's IoT, drones, robotics, digital dreams. With all these components, it’s now very necessary to make customers step forward and increase safety and efficiency.
Plus, they want to have a front operation in a visual way. They want to see what's happening and what will happen next soon. So I think we are going to help customers to achieve this. And, you know, we are in the existential era.
It is perfect that you are among the demands of the industry. How about the pipeline sector? How do you support that?
In this region, in the Middle East, we are doing a lot of pipeline projects. There is an oil and gas pipeline they built and they need to do stations to the time train. So, we supply our control equipment, easy boost station, plus some sensors to detect temperature and pressure.
For water pipelines and many projects in Saudi Arabia, we supply a leak detection system, sensors and a control system for monitoring purposes, SCADA, which is also one of our main product solutions. So, we do have many opportunities. And we target pipeline as a very strategic industry.
If we look at the future of the energy sector, what are your three tagging words for the future? What do we have to take care of? And also, the pipeline sector?
I think, I cannot think of three, but most importantly in the future, we have to achieve kind of proactive maintenance or preventive maintenance. That means, now, maintenance is all reactive.
If something happens, we take action, but what we're trying to do is before something happens, we take a profile to prevent something from happening. By doing this way, we can eliminate or reduce a lot of costs and risks.
That sounds very easy, but when it comes to doing it, you know, I think it's not easy at all. But now we're in the process of making the know-how to achieve these customers using many expensive equipment, like rotating equipment.
Before something happens, we have to get the damage. We have, you know, not to make this happen, because customers can save a lot of money, but as you know, manufacturing, they don't have to stop it. That's why this is our main key instance in the future. Thank you very much.