Investors
To Investors
Hiroshi Yokota
President
Entering the Final Fiscal Year of Medium-Term Management Plan 2025
Under our Medium-Term Management Plan 2025, we set out three priority issues: Transform our business portfolio, contribute to the mitigation of global warming, and practice socially responsible management.
Although we have started to make steady progress in transforming our business portfolio as our most important management issue, we are aware that this effort has yet to enter its final stages. In FY2025, the final fiscal year of Medium-Term Management Plan 2025, we will therefore continue to position the three segments of electronics, healthcare, and the environment as the driving force for transforming our business portfolio, and will accelerate the pace at which we address this issue by seeking to commercialize new technologies and products at the earliest possible opportunity, all while further cementing the Group's growth trajectory.
We have already made a variety of strategic moves over the past five years in these growth areas, and, more recently, in April 2025, we resolved to acquire the in vitro diagnostics and in vitro diagnostic pharmaceutical materials businesses held by JSR Corporation. This move, as we see it, will lead to significant progress in our efforts involving structural reforms and business foundation reinforcement for the healthcare sector.
As far as the electronics sector is concerned, we will begin constructing semiconductor-grade polycrystalline silicon manufacturing bases in Vietnam and Malaysia during the first half of FY2025. Because our only manufacturing bases for conventional semiconductor-grade silicon are located in Japan, this move will serve to reliably incorporate customer demand by boosting production capacity and diversifying risk. Operating as a CO2-free factory relying on hydropower-generated electricity, the Malaysia manufacturing base will also help mitigate global warming as one of our issues in Medium-Term Management Plan 2025.
Human Capital Is the Key to Sustainable Growth
Whether the Tokuyama Group will continue to grow in a sustainable manner into the future or not depends entirely on our human resources. In short, the key here is recruiting, training, and leveraging human resources with high aspirations and a positive attitude. This factor has become so important that it possesses the ability to influence the very ebb and flow of Tokuyama. Which is why we fully believe that our only path forward is to steadily transform our organizational culture to create enticing workplaces and an appealing company if we are to ensure that today's youth who possess expansive potential choose Tokuyama among their options in the chemical industry.
Although our efforts to transform the organizational culture are still a work in progress, we are confident that, among our employees, there is a nascent reemergence of the customer-focused orientation and outward looking stance that are inherent to Tokuyama. As part of this effort, we embarked upon fundamental reforms to our personnel system starting in FY2024. Specifically, we have moved from a Japanese-style personnel system in which employees are given a specific position, to a pay for job system in which each chair has value, and we select people of value to sit in those chairs. Having begun this effort by introducing a job-based personnel system for managerial positions in April 2024, we then expanded it to cover regular union employees in May 2025. Moving forward, we will continue to reform our culture by further seeking to promote employees regardless of age or gender.
To All Our Stakeholders
Based on the strengths of our technology development capabilities established over our century-plus history, we have illustrated a growth scenario for Tokuyama whereby we concentrate development resources on the growth sectors of electronics, healthcare, and the environment to establish a business portfolio for the coming generations that aligns with changes in the environment.
This underlying policy will therefore remain unchanged as part of the next Medium-Term Management Plan, which will begin in FY2026. Specifically, the Tokuyama Group will continue to rely on its unique technologies and diverse human capital as the source of its competitive advantage as we seek to tackle the solutions for the various issues faced by society, and to pursue long-term sustainable growth and maximized corporate value. At the same time, we will work diligently to help realize a sustainable economy and society as a global value-creative company.
Ever since our founding in 1918, the Tokuyama Group has steadily grown with the backing of its shareholders, investors, customers, business partners, employees, and local communities, and has reflected the various insights obtained through dialogue with our stakeholders in management and business. My personal responsibility as the head of the Tokuyama Group is to ensure we provide our unique value to all of our stakeholders, and engage in healthy and fair business practices that meet the expectations of all. Despite the ongoing uncertainty of the business environment in which the Tokuyama Group operates, we are committed to bringing together the collective strengths of the Group's employees in order to create the future of Tokuyama. I would therefore humbly ask all of you as our stakeholders for your continued understanding and support.