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Message from Management

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Making steady progress towards realizing the Company’s future growth story by leveraging stronger earnings capacity

Miyuki Ishihara
Representative Director & President

UACJ Corporation reached the milestone of its 10th anniversary on October 1, 2023. Over the past decade, the Company has grown as a world-leading aluminum products manufacturer by pursuing new businesses and welcoming subsidiaries to the UACJ Group. Today, UACJ is an extremely exciting company with incredible potential. Based on our commitment to enhancing prosperity and sustainability, we look forward to making more and more progress in the decades ahead.

The Group’s operating environment did not improve as we had anticipated, unfortunately, during the first six months of fiscal 2023, ending March 31, 2024. Declining sales of aluminum can stock, the Group’s mainstay product, prolonged the impact of excess inventory, and demand for thick plate for semiconductor manufacturing equipment was slow to recover. While sales volume of automotive body panels increased in Japan as the auto industry overcame supply bottlenecks, consolidated subsidiaries UACJ (Thailand) and Tri-Arrows Aluminum both recorded lower sales volume than in the same period of the previous fiscal year. Due to these and other factors, consolidated net sales decreased by ¥66.2 billion year on year to ¥434.9 billion.

Despite this result, the Company boosted profits in Japan by effectively using a surcharge system it had introduced to reflect higher costs of energy and raw materials in product prices. In the United States, UACJ Automotive Whitehall’s profitability improved on the back of a rebound in demand for automotive parts, and Tri-Arrows Aluminum increased profits by optimizing its product mix and cutting production costs. Thanks to these and other factors, business profit* grew by ¥7.8 billion year on year to ¥21.0 billion. On a quarterly basis, results for business profit have reached levels that indicate how the structural reforms we implemented in recent years have steadily bolstered the Company’s earnings capacity.

  • * Calculated as operating income excluding the effect of the metal price lag as well as substantial temporary and extraordinary profits and losses.

Quarterly results for business profit

We expect the Group’s operating environment to remain very challenging in the second half of fiscal 2023. Nevertheless, we have upwardly revised our forecast of business profit for the full fiscal year from ¥36.0 billion to ¥38.0 billion since the amount in the first half was higher than previously forecast.

While fiscal 2023 will likely be a low year on the whole, we expect to see a recovery in demand for both aluminum can stock and thick plate for semiconductor manufacturing equipment in the future. Indeed, we are confident that UACJ will perform strongly over the medium and long terms as a manufacturer of environmentally friendly products. We intend to increase shareholder value by managing capital more efficiently with a focus on capital costs, while actively sharing the Company’s future growth story with all shareholders. We believe that the potential for this story to become a reality is growing every day based on the Group’s stronger earnings capacity. Accordingly, management plans to increase the full year dividend for fiscal 2023 to ¥90 per share.

As the UACJ Group continues to make steady progress, we ask all of its stakeholders to continue offering their support for our management initiatives and plans.

Dividends per share