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LEAD

Competitiveness for a Global Market

To all of our stockholders and investors, I hope this message finds you in the best of health and prosperity!
While the economies of the world, and particularly those of emerging nations, now seem headed toward recovery, there remains enough instability that I think we still must temper our optimism to some degree. That said, our business has been recovering, mainly through increased overseas sales, and we're continuing to push forward toward the goals of our 6-year medium-term management plan (FY2009-2014).

In particular, our general-purpose PA systems, which have been our mainstay since 1934, comprise one of our greatest strengths in this global market. To meet the needs of our global customers even more precisely, we are heavily involved in a program of "close localization" of these and other products, including localizing all aspects of operations, from research and development to manufacturing to sales. Our vision of "an alliance of five companies each closely tied to its region," as set forth in our current medium-term management plan, represents the ideal of where we'd like to pursue this strategy fully to its logical conclusion.
The world at large is full of business opportunities, and one of the most recent is the sudden expansion of railway-related projects. We've been pursuing these projects aggressively, and just recently succeeded in selling TOA products to a major subway system in the United States. This field is very interesting for us, because in addition to public address systems, it also represents a strong potential market for the security products we've done so well within our Japanese markets. In European Union, too, we're starting to come into our own in the field of emergency broadcasting.

As a Japanese company, it's almost impossible for us to continue real growth without expanding our overseas market share. So while we'll continue reinforcing our management and product development functions here in Japan, we'll also be working hard to optimize our global supply chain, strengthen our quality assurance capabilities, and in general shore up the foundations of our competitiveness on the world stage.