Masaki OGATA

Biographical note
Mr. Ogata was born in 1952, joined Japanese National Railways (JNR) in 1974 and was afterwards assigned to East Japan Railway Company (JR East) when JNR was divided and privatised in 1987. He has been consistently working for the railways for more than 41 years. In JR East, after having experienced various management positions including General Manager of Customer Service, Investment Planning, Labour Relations, Public Relations and Transport Safety, he joined the Executive Directors as Director at the Transport and Rolling Stock Department in 2002. He was engaged many times in drafting the ‘safety middle term plan’, and as such today is considered as a leader in the field of safety within the company. From 2008 to 2011, as Executive Vice President, he took the full responsibility of the management for the safe and reliable operation of the railway network with 17 million passengers daily. At the same time, he also strongly led very important railway projects such as the speed increase up to 320 km/h on High Speed Rail, the evolution of ICT and the further development of the smart IC card “Suica”, which JR East introduced in 2001. “Suica” is the strongest smartcard ticketing and micropayment system today in Japan. As Vice Chairman of JR East since June 2011, he has been driving the open innovation and open globalisation of the management and technology onward to enhance the quality and variety of the overall business domain of JR East. He has also held the post of Vice-President of UITP (International Association of Public Transport) and chairman of the Regional and Suburban Railways Committee of UITP since May 2013. Mr. Ogata was elected President of UITP at the 61st UITP World Congress & Exhibition in June 2015. He is actively playing the role of promoting the further development and global communication networks of the public transport sector.