KROSAKI HARIMA

COMPANY

President Message


PRESIDENT MESSAGE

The Krosaki Harima Group will continue to strive to be one of the world's finest ceramics companies, supporting steel and industry.

For 100 years, since its foundation in 1919, the Krosaki Harima Group has supported Japanese manufacturing, the cornerstone of Japanese society, through the manufacture and sale of refractories to material industries such as the iron-and-steel industry. In order to achieve even greater success in the century to come, in March 2021, the Group formulated the 2025 Management Plan for the years leading up to FY2025. In our quest to be one of the world's finest ceramics companies, supporting steel and industry, we will carry out the following activities in order to achieve the targets set out in this plan.
Given the decline in domestic iron-and-steel demand resulting from the shrinking of the Japanese population and the changes in the steel export environment resulting from the growth of production capacity in other parts of East Asia, the iron-and-steel industry, the key customers of our refractory business, has decided to reduce its domestic production capacity. For overseas markets, on the other hand, demand for steel is continually rising in conjunction with population growth and economic development, especially in India and East Asia, and China is producing higher grade steel. Against this backdrop, we plan to dramatically strengthen our domestic refractory business to match the structural changes to demand in Japan and to maintain and improve the competitiveness of our core production sites in Japan. Overseas, we plan to expand sales and business through our advanced technical capabilities and through collaboration with partner companies. Through these efforts, we will strive to achieve further growth for our refractory business on a global scale.
In the furnace business segment, we will expand our maintenance operations in the iron-and-steel field and, given the ongoing shift towards eliminating carbon emissions, we will leverage our advanced design and construction technology strengths to significantly expand sales in the energy-saving industrial furnace, biomass power generation furnace, and other environmentally friendly furnace fields. In the ceramics business segment, demand is growing in the semiconductor, electronic component, and thermal insulation fields, backed by the changes affecting society, such as the rising usage of 5G, IoT, and EV technologies and moves towards carbon neutrality. We will steadily capture this demand, and we will actively move into new fields, such as the medical and space fields.
To efficiently implement our strategies and transform our business models in each of these business fields, we will actively promote digital transformation and seek to achieve an even higher level of safety, environmental performance, disaster prevention, and internal control, which are the foundations of our company's existence.
As global society moves from a low-carbon approach to a zero-carbon approach, contributing to society's decarbonization has become one of the most critical business challenges. As a group of companies that live up to the mandates of society and the trust that society has placed in us, we are working as one to achieve decarbonization.
We do not simply pursue economic growth. Instead, we also actively engage in efforts to address social issues, such as environmental problems, and pursue harmony between people and nature. We see the creation of a sustainable society as a vital task, and will continue to be a beneficial and cosmopolitan group that supports the future of humanity and our planet. Recognizing the importance of working together to achieve the shared goals of the SDGs, in December 2021, we formulated our Basic Sustainability Activity Policy. It sets forth our policy of resolutely combatting climate change using our heat control technologies, promoting diversity and inclusion, protecting local environments (water environments, green environments, and air quality), coexisting with communities, promoting recycling, and engaging in other activities. Under this policy, we will actively work to tackle these issues.
Over the century to come, the Krosaki Harima Group will continue to grow and use all of its strengths to take on new challenges as we aim to become one of the world's finest ceramics companies, supporting steel and industry, and contribute to all of our stakeholders.

President
Kazuhiro Egawa