Presentation Transcripts

If you look further into our business plan for this fiscal year, in the machined components business segment you can see that we expect to sell 160 million ball bearing units externally in June. When we announced our Five Arrows strategy in November 2013, 130 million units was the most we could sell per month. This monthly figure increased by 20 million units in just over a year and a half. Now it's going to reach 160 million units in June. The competition is really struggling in the ball bearing market, giving us an even bigger lead. Small Chinese suppliers of low-priced mass-produced ball bearings have been hampered by the strong Chinese yuan, stricter domestic environmental regulations, and mounting labor costs that are growing 15% annually. As I've always contended, when the global GDP growth rate reaches about 3.5%, the middle- and high-income population increases worldwide. This growth goes hand in hand with booming sales of high-end consumer products and the high-end parts used in them. That's why we anticipate steady profit growth for machined components.
While there are concerns that the competition is following on our heels in the LED backlight business, those fears are unfounded. I often say this about our ball bearings. If you ask other companies to try making the same kind of small precision ball bearings, they just can do it. Sure, they can make a small quantity of them with little difficulty but don't ask them to make 250 million units a month. That's something nobody else but Minebea can do. The same goes for LED backlights used in smartphones. If you ask them to make extremely thin, precision LED backlights, they can make some. Ask them to make 30 million of them by next month and the answer is no one else but Minebea can do that. I firmly believe that this is what makes us the company we are today.
We are now working closely with Sartorius MTH's team in Germany which has already come up with a number of ideas. Sartorius MTH handles a wide array of testing equipment used for food-related production lines, starting from the point where a truckload of raw materials are brought in and weighed until they are processed into products, packaged and shipped. Sartorius MTH is looking to incorporate wireless technology into these operations and we will move full speed ahead to explore new applications of our products as we begin to place a keener focus on this type of business.