NICHICON ELECTRONICS (TIANJIN) CO., LTD. has begun the overseas production of tantalum electrolytic capacitors to meet demands in the expanding Asian market (October 2004). With this startup, the tantalum electrolytic capacitor business of our group has become one of the largest in the world and the production system of priority products in China was put into place, thus adding aluminum electrolytic capacitors and circuit products manufactured at NICHICON ELECTRONICS (WUXI) CO., LTD. to our lineup.
In Japan, we significantly reinforced our production capacity of electrode foils for aluminum electrolytic capacitors and promoted the aggressive development of differentiated merchandise, thus fortifying our technological prowess and cost effectiveness even further.

Truly cultivating growth markets by “make the strong stronger”
In order to ground our framework for increasing our revenue and profit on a firm basis, we also intend to accelerate the development of new products and expand sales in our four top priority fields in the future. As the means of achieving this goal, we intend to concentrate management resources by focusing on further strengthening the fields where we are technologically superior to our competitors and highly valued by our customers.

The top priority markets we are focusing on are the “digital home appliances,” “automobile-related appliances,” “inverter-equipped products,” and “information and communications-related appliances,” each of which can be expected to grow significantly in the future. Among these markets, our expectations are particularly high for the automobile market, where we already have an established track record in terms of products for hybrid cars. Given the growing number of electronics applications, the number of electronic components mounted in each car is rapidly increasing as well. This represents a big opportunity for our group. We intend to further cultivate the European and US markets, where the demand for products for automobile-related applications is growing, and put our energies into Asian markets including China.

Fulfilling Corporate Social Responsibilities
Nichicon recognizes the fact that making dedicated efforts toward fulfilling our Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) is one of our important management issues. In our group, we have set up a CSR office, as well as compliance (with laws and regulations), corporate governance, risk management, environment preservation activities social contributions, and other matters of concern. We are committed to continuously improving our environmental performance as well, and are promoting the development of products based on the strict observation of all relevant laws and regulations. We will also focus on enriching our environmentally friendly product lineups in the future.

The Nichicon Group has taken the first steps toward a new and significant progression. It is our responsibility to develop products with higher value added than before in terms of quality, as well as to provide products and services that can satisfy our customers wholeheartedly. We are determined to carry forward continuous improvement in all fields that we deal with, do our best, and secure a course for continuous growth in our pursuit of higher corporate values.

Finally, we ask that our shareholders continue providing us with their valuable support and comprehensive understanding of the Nichicon Group.