Margarida Marques

Meet Margarida Marques. VP, Portugal Country Lead & Head of Continental Europe

• 17+ years with Hitachi
• Started when Hitachi European operations began
• Born and raised in Lisbon

I was working as a finance assistant in a small consulting firm. I always had a lot of curiosity about the projects, what they did and what it was all about. One day I asked if I could shadow one of the team members in a project. 

And so just like that, an opportunity to make a management information system for a bank came to me. They found my financial skills useful, and I immediately joined the team. The team had lot of freshers, developers, and they were under a lot of pressure. Instead of just sitting with the developers and see their struggle, I asked them to teach me the basics in order lend a hand and ease their pressure. Like this, I started debugging and compiling code, and then suddenly I was optimizing codes.

At the end of the project, it was like I almost forgot finance and preferred this instead. So here I am many years after that experience. Quite frankly, I don’t regret any of it for one single minute.

From the Ground Up

Back in 2006, when we were still Hitachi Consulting, we launched simultaneously in the UK, Spain, and Portugal. It was an extremely small team. In Portugal, there were only two of us, and I came from a Big Four consulting firm. So, with everything – processes and systems to be established and people to be hired, it was a real challenge and that’s what attracted me the most.

Building something completely from scratch – the kind of challenge that I didn’t have in my previous job in an established Big Four Consulting firm attracted me the most. When I look back and think that we had to do all of it, think about ideas, plans – it’s an amazing accomplishment. I learnt a lot and found it very rewarding, the people I recruited. And the part of team that joined then are still here and in our team. I am extremely grateful to have them with me and of course with Hitachi.

Building something from scratch with a team creates such a bond, especially when you overcome those challenges together.

The Evolution of Hitachi

Hitachi Consulting and some of the other Hitachi entities evolved from being niche companies operating in different areas, with different country of focus, various markets, and no international collaboration to integrating into a global company with lot of networking, exchange of resources and teams.

Today, Hitachi is doing more complex work and developing valuable projects for our customers. It has also become more integrated with other Hitachi group companies. When I started 16 years ago, the concept of ‘One Hitachi’ was non-existent. And if you see today this has become a market differentiator for us, which I always believed from the outset.