New Year Message from President and CEO (abridged version)

January 4, 2019
Ichiro Okamoto, President and CEO
Nippon Light Metal Holdings Co., Ltd.

Summary of President’s New Year’s Greeting

Please accept my warmest wishes for 2019, and GO ANZEN NI.
“Safety takes priority over everything else.” This year too, I will begin with these words. I keep repeating these words because I truly believe that people working together without injury and finding their jobs rewarding day after day is the starting point of corporate activities. Please return to the basis of safety, which is “placing importance on small things,” and build the places where you work into workplaces with absolutely no accidents. “Safety takes priority over everything else.” Keeping those words in mind, let’s strive again this year to bring happiness to the people around us and the people in the world.

The NLM Group has been marching on intently toward its goals for the final year of the Midterm Management Plan established in 2016 and has reached the point where we can grasp our goal of full-year ordinary income of 31.0 billion yen, which we declared three years ago. Evaluations of us by external ratings organizations that assess companies’ financial soundness have improved and, although little by little, I feel that outside parties are starting to see our changes. Going forward, let’s keep aiming for growth without ever feeling satisfied.
“Growth” does not mean aiming for simple quantitative expansion; I see it as continuously pitching to the world new products and new business models that make maximal use of the power of “knowledge.” The products that we make must provide real “customer value,” not imagined “self-satisfied value.” Value is created from the sum of different activities carried out steadily in numerous manufacturing processes in or across several departments including raw materials purchasing, design, production, distribution, construction, and service. It is the customer’s overall evaluation of a product at the time that the product is ultimately in the customer’s hands. Our efforts congeal into “value for the customer” only when we try to optimize the whole Create-Make-Sell process, not when individual departments only try to optimize themselves. This is what makes our team power so crucial.
The effort to expand our business fields through the activity of creating new value for customers by making full use of the Group’s strengths as a team is what will lead to growth. It goes without saying that it is our fate as a “Groundbreaking Innovator of Aluminum and Beyond” to keep making the effort to always create things that have never been sold before, things that have never been made before. This is by no means an easy path; it can be a thorny path. Nonetheless, let’s boldly and actively charge ahead.

This year—2019—is the 80th year since Nippon Light Metal was founded in 1939. Last year, after careful consideration, it was decided to move our head office from Tennozu Isle to Shinbashi. This decision was based on the idea that “a new getup is necessary” to become a corporate group that continues to create new value for customers by further facilitating communication and collaboration within the Group.
I learned this later, but, amazingly, the land in Shinbashi that we moved to is actually the location where Nippon Light Metal saw the first light of day eighty years ago. While remembering the efforts of those who came before us over the past eighty years, let’s start forging a new future.
The path we are following might not be the path followed by past materials manufacturers. However, let’s believe that it is the path best suited for the NLM Group. And let’s believe too that we can leave a path blazed behind us.
Everyone, let’s achieve growth steadily again this year, one step at a time, following a great vector as Team NLM—Groundbreaking Innovator of Aluminum and Beyond. GO ANZEN NI.

Contact: Public Relations and Investor Relations
  Planning Administration Dept.
  Nippon Light Metal Holdings Co., Ltd.