This year marks the 58th anniversary of our founding. The business, which began with film development for aerial photogrammetry, has evolved into an image service centered on large-scale plate-making cameras, and the business has expanded with the application of paper and film for design and drafting to the wave of rapid growth, and the application of film for mapping to general commercial printing. In the 1990s, the wave of computerization came to a halt, rapid economic growth stopped, various industries changed, and the way we use film also changed. In the 2000s, films for materials for the electronics industry, such as theKIMOTECT™film for the printed circuit board manufacturing process, the diffusion film for LCD backlightsKB-FILM™the for touch panels, attracted attention, contributing to the improvement of business performance.
In 2008, the world was hit by an economic crisis, and our company was greatly affected, resulting in severe performance. We deeply apologize to our shareholders, business partners, employees, and their families.
Looking back, it was thanks to 'people, people, people' that we were able to overcome external challenges several times in the past. Even now, with the cooperation of our customers and business partners, and the combined efforts of our employees, we are striving towards performance recovery.
We recognize that the number of Japanese companies with over 100 years of history is incomparable to those in Europe and the United States. For our company, 100 years is still a long way off, but we believe that overcoming the current recession is a great opportunity to acquire the know-how for 100 years of continuity. We hope to successfully pass on this experience to the younger generation who will support our company in the future.
The corporate culture of Japanese companies is being re-evaluated. We consider 'family-like management' to be a good point of Japanese companies, and we will strive to continue and develop our company by contributing even a little to society and world peace.
June 2009