Presentation Transcripts

There are a number of factors that drove performance up. For one thing, our machined components business, which includes ball bearings, was booming. External sales of ball bearings hit a record high 155 million units in March just before the fiscal year ended. Then sales exceeded 150 million units just this April and are expected to reach 150 million units once again in May. We project that sales will hit another all-time high of 160 million units in June. At the moment we can be sure of reaching our Five Arrows goal of a monthly average external shipment volume of 150 million units, which I'll go into detail later on. I'd like to turn your attention to the subject of drones, which have been causing quite a stir recently. We're seeing them being used more and more around the world and in fact one manufacturer has ordered three million ball bearings from us. That's because we are the only company capable of supplying large quantities of high quality, low-noise small ball bearings that are durable enough to keep on working under any conditions. At work in a host of applications from automobile windshield wipers and more, our ball bearings are quickly becoming the go-to product for this kind of special application.
We finally beat the competition in the LED backlight market, where advanced production technologies are a must. While one of our competitors was still struggling to get production operations off the ground in order to meet the needs of a certain customer, we successfully ramped up our production literally vertically all thanks to our technological edge in ultra-precision machining and assembly.
I'm really delighted to say that, as you can see in the rightmost graph, sales of our electronic devices and components excluding LED backlights jumped 19%. This increase came mainly from measuring components and motors as well as our new EMS (Electro Mechanics Solutions® (*registered in Japan)) assembly business. All these factors combined paved the way to reaching our major target of 500 billion yen.