Presentation Transcripts

First of all, we failed to turn around the HDD spindle motor business. Our goal was to bounce back by the end of the last fiscal year and I take full responsibility as CEO for being unable to reach our goal. While I hesitate to make excuses, we cannot overlook the impact of declining unit prices on top of delayed production increases. While we made improvements in keyboard production, our efforts just didn't pay off as well for HDD spindle motors.

On the plus side, product quality has definitely improved and so has our technology. Our new HDD spindle motors have been given high marks by our customers and are outstanding products without a doubt. We can clearly see the roadblocks to profitability that remain and are poised to overcome them.

While an operational deficit had prevented us from overhauling our production equipment, we are planning to boost production capacity 30% by late June or July. This should enable us to dedicate machines to a single product line instead of constantly retooling the same machines to manufacture various lines with different product specs.

We are also optimizing our shop floor layout at different factories to find space. We will concentrate the bulk of our motor operations in the Lop Buri Plant and move machined components operations to the space created in the Bang Pa-in Plant. We are using the plant we acquired from FDK exclusively for machined components production. While we are running out of space at production facilities around the globe, thanks to the excellent foresight of Minebea's founders who planed our sites and facilities with an eye to future growth, we have enough room to meet any urgent need to increase production.

As the CEO, I'm committed to making our operations profitable once again by the end of September at the latest. Everyone at Minebea is pulling together to reach this goal. Once again I hate to make excuses, but we started last year with so many businesses running in the red and we had to scramble just to get them back on track. We are now zeroing in on boosting production and fixing the HDD spindle motor business, and I hope you will bear with us as we work to implement improvements.