Fiscal 2025 Message to New Employees from the President

UACJ Corporation announced today that President Shinji Tanaka has given the following fiscal 2025 message to new employees of the UACJ Group.

I am extremely delighted to welcome all of you here today. As president of UACJ Corporation, I would like to congratulate each and every one of you for joining the UACJ Group.

The UACJ Group is currently working to realize UACJ Vision 2030, our long-term roadmap extending up to 2030, while aiming to supply aluminum materials with even more added value than before.

Looking back on 2024, the global economy grew steadily as inflation was brought down and international trade picked up. Nevertheless, the global economic outlook is unpredictable. Against this backdrop, we launched a new mid-term management plan in May of last year with the goals of creating earnings, building partnerships, and promoting the environmental benefits of aluminum. As strategies for adding more value to aluminum materials, we will promote recycling, expand fabricated material businesses, help stabilize supply chains in technologically advanced industries, and grow new businesses. For each of these four strategies, we have begun taking steps aimed at maximizing revenues.

Today, all of you are embarking on your careers in the aluminum industry, which is now backed by strong tailwinds. Demand for aluminum products is growing worldwide thanks to economic growth in emerging countries. Moreover, aluminum is attracting attention as a useful material for solving environmental issues. In the workplaces you will be assigned to from now, I hope that each of you will demonstrate your full potential and continue to grow and find success going forward. To provide a few words of advice, I would like to talk about three important topics.

The first is the Group’s purpose and vision statements as well as the values that make up the UACJ Way. Our Purpose is to “contribute to a prosperous and sustainable society with technologies that bring out the innate power of materials.” Our Vision is stated as follows: “Aluminum is our passion. It inspires our work in building a better world and healthier environment.” The UACJ Way is a set of basic guidelines for putting this into practice. It is founded on the basic principles of safety and compliance, and provides guidelines for actions in line with three values: respect and understand your associates, embrace honesty and foresight, and be curious and challenging. All employees are expected to follow these shared guidelines so that the Group can continue contributing to people’s livelihoods and communities in the future. Wherever in the world you are assigned to work, I hope that you always deal with customers sincerely and strive to create new value in accordance with the Group’s purpose, vision, and values. One of the themes of our new mid-term management plan is to build partnerships with people, and I want you to act with the conviction that whatever cannot be solved by individuals can be solved by teams.

My second topic is our five basic principles of action: understand how our factories operate, know our products inside and out, recognize how everything actually works, act rationally, and make decisions based on established rules.

When my career first began, I was initially assigned to a manufacturing division. My first big assignment was to devise a plan to boost aluminum can stock capacity by six times within a single year in order to meet rising demand for beverage cans. While looking at plans and considering how to tackle such a challenging project, I received some advice from my boss. He told me to go to the company’s factories to check our products and understand what was actually happening onsite. Because I followed this advice, I was able to complete the assignment. In retrospect, the approach I learned is based on our five basic principles of action. Later on in my career, I was able to handle unforeseen problems that occurred by understanding what was actually going on and taking appropriate actions in line with the rules we had in place.

Thirdly, I would like to talk about safety and compliance. Safety is so fundamental that people routinely express it with a greeting in some countries. In Germany, for example, the word, glückauf, was originally used as a greeting by miners to express their desire to return safely from the mine. Similarly, members of the manufacturing industry in Japan often greet each other with the phrase, go-anzen ni, which literally means “stay safe.” At UACJ, too, employees regularly greet each other with this phrase as a way of maintaining a shared awareness of safety. I would like all of you, as well, to wholeheartedly greet your co-workers this way in your workplace, as it reflects our long-standing tradition of giving priority to safety in everything we do while taking responsibility for one’s own safety.

Meanwhile, compliance is a minimum requirement of all members of society. In business, we must fully comply with laws concerning health and safety, the environment, and product quality, while also following various rules, including our internal regulations as well as requirements specified by customers. From this time forward, I expect all of you to start learning these rules and make sure to follow them.

From today, you will begin your career path as working adults. I wish each of you many successes in the future.