Today's Notables

As you may know, the end of the year for our company is November 20th, bringing a close to our 59th period. I am writing this Notables one month prior to that close and although it is still too early to announce our results at this very moment, I can say that we are very close to achieving our financial targets for this period. Beginning November 21st, we will be starting the 60th period under the current midterm business plan, "RESET" which emphasizes "Re-Engineering" of our operations from the viewpoint of sustainability in the many facets of our business. In May of this year, the new Corporate Law came into affect and in order to comply, we had to change our bylaws. The major change was the establishment of involvement in accounting affairs. The Corporate Law now requires the participation of a tax accountant or CPA, tax auditory and statutory auditor to participate and hold an official position on the board of directors. "Accounting participation" means that financial statements are developed by an internal employee who participates at directors' meetings to get approval of financial statements and who has the duty to make certain that there is no falsification in any of the financial statements. The revision of the law enhances the reliability of the financial information from a third party perspective. With the new requirements, Mr. Takemoto, a tax accountant, who has been an auditor up to now, has assumed the responsibility of financial affairs and will take his new position beginning this year.

Aside from the above changes, we have two other major tasks this year. The first is changing the accounting period from November 20th to the end of March. This may cause some inconvenience for our customers and other business partners as our deadlines and company registration changed; but there are several merits to this change and therefore, we decided to go ahead. Therefore, the period starting November 21 will be 4 months and 10 days which is highly irregular, but we hope you will understand and cooperate as we make this transition.

The second major task was the establishment of a new department as the title of this Notables suggests. Currently the Sales department for Primix is divided into Chemicals/Energy, Pharmaceuticals/Cosmetics/Food, Sine Pump, and Overseas Sales. The industry that the customer is in determines the responsibility of the Sales Section. However, we felt it necessary to have a special task force other than the Sales Department to address the ever changing conditions in the world. When I say "conditions in the world," I am specifically referring to nothing other than batteries. Personal ownership of cellular phones in Japan only right now is over 93,000,000 phones which is about 93% market saturation. On a global level, 570,000,000 people own personal computers, which is expected to rise to 1.3 billion by 2010. A number of different types of batteries are used in personal computers and among them, laptops, require a secondary storage battery. Vehicles also require batteries. Fossil fuels are extremely expensive; there's a global cry to reduce CO₂ emissions; and the demand for hybrid vehicles that use hydrogen and lithium-ion fuel cells is rising. Technological developments continue to improve and enhance fuel cells and solar batteries use for household equipment and products. In the next five years, the market for electrical storage devices is expected to grow 83%.

Under these circumstances and with our current track record of mixers used in battery manufacturing processes, we have determined through our research that we can help our customers improve the quality of their product while dramatically decreasing production time with our patented thin-film, high-speed mixer. Therefore, beginning this period, we have established a department devoted to this specific area and named it "PEACE," which stands for "Processing Engineering Achieving Clean Energy." As the name suggests, the department will specialize in developing mixing applications in manufacturing processes that contribute toward products using "clean energy." The word "PEACE" suggests that through the use of clean energy, we can reduce of CO₂ emissions and slow the pace of global warming toward a more peaceful coexistence with Mother Earth. PEACE will not be a Sales Department in the traditional sense. Staff specialized in technological development, engineering, and customer testing that our customers demand, will provide consultative sales on processing engineering in the area of battery manufacturing and work toward the development of a system that can capture the needs of the battery device industry from a number of different facets. We also plan on enhancing our facilities by establishing a specialized battery device laboratory for customer-visit testing at headquarters and the Saitama branch office.

We look forward to the support and cooperation of our stakeholders as we put our best foot forward in our vigorous and energetic progress toward a new phase in our growth and development starting this period and from April of next year.