Message from the President

The value of a corporation is the value it holds as an economic entity able to create profit through its activities. However, for a corporation to continue to develop through the support of consumers and society, it must embrace not only economic but cultural values as well. Going beyond the pursuit of profits, the sum being of the company - its corporate culture, its people, and its relation to society - must exist through the support and understanding of not only customers, but of every level of society.

In April of 2000, Takara announced the establishment of the "Takara Group Long-Term Management Organization: Takara Evolution-100 (TE-100)". TE-100 is a corporate evaluation that is a synthesis of economic and cultural evaluation.

We've taken three important viewpoints -- "Customer Viewpoint", "Human Respect Viewpoint", and "Balance between Nature and Society" - and made these important managerial stances for improving corporate value. We will implement five steps as a concrete strategy: "Evolution of Achievements", "Evolution of Business", "Evolution of Management", "Evolution of Corporate Culture and Personnel", and "Evolution of Social and Environmental Actions". We've recognized environmental activities as being not only socially responsible but actually vital to the creation of corporate value, and have announced a more positive development of our environmental activities.

There are tradeoffs between corporate economic activities and environmental activities; that the balance between the two is a targeted management objective indicates just how difficult a task it is. Our company expresses the environmental impact we create as ECO units in our Green Balance Report, as we try to explain this impact to the public in easy-to-understand terms. This is because we want to use the attention society places on our environmental activities as an incentive to continue trying to balance economics and the environment. We hope that you will come to understand our environmental activities through this report, and welcome your comments or questions.