At the same time, they often try to absorb the rise in wage costs and keep their prices unchanged mainly through labor-saving and efficiency-improving investment that makes use of information technology. In fact, software investment plans of small firms for fiscal 2017 have marked a significant increase of more than 20 percent on a year-on-year basis (Chart 8).
In addition, many firms lately are trying to absorb the rise in wage costs by streamlining the existing business process. In other words, they are making efforts to reduce services for which labor costs are too high to make profits.