Now, at the beginning of the year, I would like to extend my sincere wishes that you all have a happy 2024.

1. Progress in the Medium-Term Management Plan 2025

We are now two years and nine months into our Medium-Term Management Plan 2025, launched in April 2021. The second half of the match has begun. Looking back at progress, starting with our traditional businesses, our Chemicals and Cement business segments have both faced unprecedented increases in raw material and fuel prices since 2021 and have reported significant decline in profits, especially in FY2022; however, since the beginning of FY2023, these business segments have been generating revenue as a result of sales price revisions and have the potential to become cash cows.
In the Chemicals business segment, we have implemented structural reforms such as integrating sales operations into Tokuyama Soda Trading Co., Ltd. and making Shin Dai-ichi Vinyl Corporation into a wholly owned subsidiary and absorbing it by way of absorption-type merger on April 2024. In the Cement business segment, we have considered the 2-kiln structure in more depth and focused on rebuilding the business. Meanwhile, in the Life Science business segment, as a top contender in dental materials and equipment and photochromic materials, we have carried out reforms at our Kashima Factory to radically improve the efficiency of the supply chain. At A&T Corporation, the employees themselves developed an AI-based quality inspection system, which has remarkably improved efficiency, and we intend to roll this system out groupwide in the future. At Tokuyama Factory, there are signs of new initiatives to innovate domestic manufacturing which is fighting for survival, with staff from the Silicon Manufacturing Dept. showing innovation by taking charge of equipment maintenance themselves. I expect executives and manager-level positions in every business division to actively focus on ensuring that such initiatives are rolled out groupwide as quickly as possible.

2. Our tasks in growth businesses and future approach

In our electronics, healthcare and environment businesses, the key to business creation and development is "marketing and R&D." If we take the electronics business as an example, we need to have a good grasp of our customer's roadmap and gauge the timing of technological innovation. Marketing staff and developer will need to collaborate with each other and spend several years preparing sales proposals. To this end, we will be required to stay abreast of technologies whilst building relationships both with our customers and with high caliber talent in scientific and industrial circles, and how we gain access to cutting edge information networks will decide whether we win or lose. We will need to sequentially update information and reflect this intelligence in our development policies.
To pull this off, talent is everything. Talent is the ability to continue to strive. For marketing staff, the ability to propose themes to development divisions and the ability to figure out what customers need will be key, while for developers, the ability to come up with ideas in response to proposals, to develop products in time, and to propose them to customers will be essential. We will keep exchanging information amongst ourselves and with those outside the group and never postpone our goals, and we will apply this kind of perseverance to all value creation type work.
At the start of a new year, I ask that each and every one of you contemplates your own mission once again and asks whether you are really striving for value creation in your work. Our picture of the future depends on the action we take now.