Nihon M&A Center Holdings Inc.

Thank you very much for joining us today. We would like to begin the financial results presentation for the first quarter of the fiscal year ending March 2027. Today, we are broadcasting this presentation with simultaneous interpretation to audience of the entire world. I believe that there are some people who are listening to this presentation early in the morning or at midnight. Thank you very much for joining this session despite time difference. Please present our resume for the session. Nihon M&A Center Holdings has a purpose. It's to bring best-in-class M&A ever closer. We have been running our business with this purpose. Many investors, I believe, are already Thank you for joining us. We implemented improvement measures and we have recovered. And in the fiscal year that ended in March 2026, we had our record sales and ordinary profit. We achieved record high in both of them. A full-fledged recovery was made, we believe. And finally, starting from the current fiscal year, We are founding our company once again, and we are starting Vision 300 next to Genesis. And the first quarter that we are announcing our result today is the very first quarter under this new Vision 300. That's why the first quarter has been a very important quarter for us. So we are announcing and explaining the results of that very important first quarter for us. Starting with the overall summary, I believe that the results this time was very satisfactory for us. Three reasons for that. The first reason, we had very solid growth in sales and profit. And the second reason is the other pillar, which is the fund business. We recorded enough and solid gains from the fund business. And the third one is the most important one. This is related to leading indicators. Leading indicators that shows the prospect for Q2 to Q4. We had very strong leading indicators. These are the three factors that have led to the satisfactory results in Q1. Starting with sales. 9.1 billion, up 0.9% year-on-year. And 180 H transactions were closed. This count was down by 11.3%, but ordinary profit was 2.252 billion yen, down by 11.1% year-on-year, and free tax profit was 3,156,000,000, up by 24.6% year-on-year. However, We sold an investment target from ATG Capital, which is our fund business, and that was $780 million, almost $800 million. And this gain on sale of investment was recorded as extraordinary gain. And we had to handle this as extraordinary gain due to accounting principles. But as a business, this is almost equal to recording sales, additional sales. If we could have recorded this as part of our total sales, then the actual sales, $9.1 billion, would have been $9.891 billion, up by 9.7%. And the ordinary profit was $3,390 billion, up by 20%, and free tax profit would have been and many more. and our intermediate holding company. And there's a contribution from this fund sector, more specifically from J Capital. This has been the, or the ATG Capital that makes investment mainly in overseas projects and that generated a profit of about 800 million yen. And I believe that the fund business made quite a big contribution this time that captures people's attention. And the third factor, once again, is leading indicators that were solid this time, starting with new sell-side mandates. That was 347, up by 20.1% compared to the same time last year. This, as the first quarter, was the best in our history, and of which mid-cap mandates were 76. The 76 mid-cap mandates acquired was up by 31% year-on-year. So, keeping M&A sales per deal, I believe, is quite possible at a solid level. And also, we have transactions under negotiation, and that stock is at a record high level. As of the end of June, such stock for the negotiations or the transactions under negotiation was 17% up compared to the same month last year. 17% increase. And in the first quarter, we had entering fee received, and entering fee received in Q1 was 17% higher compared to the same time last year. So transactions under negotiations are the transactions that are experienced in negotiations that are in pipeline. These are the transactions that are going to be closed and will be impacting our sales and profit. And so we will have the second quarter up to September and the third quarter up to December. We believe that this solid number of transactions under negotiations are going to lead to solid results in Q2 and Q3. And new sales side mandates that I've mentioned at the beginning of this session So for the third quarter results to December and the fourth quarter results to March, I believe that these two quarters are going to benefit significantly from the new sales side mandates. And we have had really good leading indicators. And that's the summary. In the previous fiscal year, we had the record high sales and profit. So In March, we have kind of felt that we have done all the best we could because we had best-in-class sales and profit. But I believe that putting ourselves in a good business cycle in the previous fiscal year didn't drag us in the first quarter this time. We believe that we made good preparation for achieving our target this fiscal year because we have enough pipelines and enough mandates. So we're going to use them fully so we can leave good results in the second and the third quarter, and we're going to reach a peak in progress acceleration. And this is how we plan to get us back to the customary cycle of performance achievement. Now, we'll move on to balance sheet and income statement. And I will hand over to Mr. Naraki for the explanation. Hello, this is Naraki. I'm going to first touch on income statement, more specifically sales. As was mentioned by Mr. Miyake, we have all the figures listed on this page. And as you can see, increasing M&A sales per transaction and decreasing number of transactions closed are the two major points. But in the second row, you can see the number of transactions closed, and I have to talk about this. There was a postponement of the closure timing. Therefore, the number of transactions under negotiation at the end of June was at record high level. And according to our internal document, Transactions under negotiations that are big to a certain extent grew by 17% compared to the same time last year. And in the first quarter, we received interim fee and that was $1,358,000,000 compared to $112,000,000 recorded last year There was an increase of 17%, so we have that many active mandates this time. And you can find the same detail in our attention report. Next page, please. Now, on to expense and profit. Starting with personnel cost. So, personnel cost has Part of cost of sales, this is the personnel fee for M&A consultants and front office staff, that was 2.2 billion, up by 6.5% year-on-year. And in the second box, there is a different type of personnel cost. This includes support people, that includes sales staff, and that was down by 3% at 1 billion, 51 million yen. and as you can see at the top about referral fees and outsourcing expenses, compared to the same time last year, this was down by 16.1%. So ratio of direct mandates out of total transactions closed increased. Therefore, referral fee ratio out of sales went down by 2.2 points. Thank you for your attention. You may feel that this is quite a big increase year on year. However, compared to the budget, these are actually on pace with our budget. And also you can see ordinary profit of 2,252,000,000 yen. As we explained, we have the ATG capital related contribution of 787,000,000 yen. Thank you very much. from the company that we fully own. So we have to treat this as extraordinary gain. And about P&L summary, this is going to be a repetition of what I've explained already, so I'm going to skip this page. And finally, on balance sheet, we've been keeping healthy balance sheet. In the top row, we have asset data as of the end of the first quarter. Thank you for the explanation. Now, we will move on to the topic about which we receive a lot of Questions from investors. And this is about leading indicators. These are important to understand or estimate our future results. And as we've explained before, along the flow of our deal process, we're going to take you through our leading indicators, starting with the number of new sell-side mandates. That was 347, up by 20.1%, and of which mid-cap mandates were 76%. Up by 31% year-on-year. And new buy-side mandates. The count was 351, up by 4.8%. And of sell-side mandates, there were mandates in central areas More urban areas. And the central area ratio was 61%. I believe this is a favorable trend for us. And even after we acquire mandates, if we cannot do enough pre-due diligence for those mandates, we cannot do good matching. So our company could focus on solid pre-due diligence in what we call a preparatory phase. So we have to do preparation before matching. and the process of preparation used to take 90 days previously, but we shortened that to, or we have been trying to shorten that to 60 days. This has been a major project for us. And as a result, our preparatory phase is less than 60 days at 56 days. Lead time is now shorter, which means that we can handle more transactions, more mandates now. So the number of transactions closed and other financial performance will improve with the shortened lead time. The next point is on the number of transactions closed and the number of mandates acquired. At the bottom, we have the number of new suicide mandates. Please pay attention to this number. In the first quarter, from March 2024, and then 289. And this time, this first quarter, we acquired 347 new sales side mandates. So this 347 was the record high as the first quarter results. For the second, third, and the fourth quarter, I believe that we made good preparation. And there's another important leading indicator, which is the number of employees. M&A consultants. We had 626 consultants at the end of the previous fiscal year and the most recent number is 635. There was an increase and also there are people who already joined our company after the number of people who accepted our offer and those people are 55 in count and going forward we're going to accelerate our recruiting efforts and Please pay attention to corporate staff. From 201 to 236, there was an increase in corporate staff. In the past few years, we reduced corporate staff and we had a project of improving direct and indirect divisions. Despite such project, we had an increase in corporate staff count. And I have to explain this. This is because we used to do operation management that was done by M&A support department previously, and this team is now escalated to an operation management department, and this is now included in the corporate segment. And we have more than 20 people that do the work, so that led to the meaningful increase in corporate staff. and to explain what this work is about. For the past few years, we started to take more responsibility about our results to what we do, outcome of generating best-in-class M&A that has been the focus of our management, focus of our target of accountability. It's because Lucien, MJG and other similar inappropriate Thank you very much. is to do enough examination at the time of accepting mandates. And after that, there is negotiation process. And in that negotiation process, we decided to do more confirmation of whether we have done enough due diligence and whether we have taken enough processes and enough steps. We also started to examine more about the scheme, etc., and we also have been checking more thoroughly about whether seller owner's guarantee is released, etc. These work are done by the people of the operation management and these people are going to be part of the headquarter going forward.

Next, let us move into our mid-term management plan. This fiscal year's first half and second half When you look at the sales balance, it's 45% against 55%. First half, we want to overachieve this in terms of performance. Fortunately, pipeline, we have many deals that are currently in discussion, so we will continue to properly manage our business. Last fiscal year, The Midterm Management Plan of the Fiscal Year 27. You're able to achieve $19 billion ordinary profit against the original target of $17 billion in Fiscal Year 25. With that momentum, in Fiscal Year 2026, we aim to deliver upside results in a very solid manner. And NextGenesis Vision 300 To achieve ordinary profits of 30 billion in fiscal year 2032. In order to achieve that, we will continue to accelerate our efforts. Now, what exactly is NextGenesis? I would like to explain this. Our company, from this fiscal year, we have started our second founding. Our second founding is means two things. One, it is about succession, passing on things to the next generation. But the larger meaning and significance, our company has reached a 35th anniversary in this year, we are celebrating our 35th anniversary. Compared against 35 years ago, or even compared against five years ago, ten years ago, the world has greatly changed. M&A has transformed from a B2B job. It's now transferring into a B2C type job. M&A is not being that special. And we are now moving into an age of A.I. We are trying to properly handle this and create a new business model. This is Vision 300, NextGenesis, and our second founding. Now, in order to achieve this, the entire company needs to unite together, and in order to do that, we have started a trust-type stock compensation plan. Shareholders, investors, and management and employees. We all get on the same ship. We all make efforts towards the same purpose. That is what we want to achieve. And as a symbol of that, we will also relocate our head office. We are planning to relocate our head office. This current head office is split up across four different floors. It is difficult To have real physical communication with each other. We are now planning to relocate to a building where a single floor is very wide.

And the consultant team, the sales team, will be consolidated into one single floor.

And we will maximize real communication. And that is how you will do our succession but also create innovation at the same time. We can achieve that we'll become the symbol to achieve the true purpose of our second founding. And the background is our mission framework that has been redesigned. Vision, starting with regional revitalization, driving the renewal of Japan and ultimately become the world's number one integrated M&A company. In order to achieve that, we have core values. Be a professional. That is our core value. and our sales organization has greatly transformed too. In the past, we have been mainly focusing on small SMEs, but it's not just SMEs. In listed companies too, there's a lot of business reorganization carve-outs, attempts to focus on where you can win, and in order to handle that situation, IV coverage, We have created those divisions so we can respond to the needs of listed companies too. Next, let us move on to shareholder equity, shareholder breakdown. Naraki will explain.

I will explain the pages on shareholder equity and shareholder breakdown. Just like in the previous year, we plan to continue the dividend payment of 29 yen. That includes 4 yen of extraordinary or special dividend. And as you see at the bottom of this page, during the period of midterm plan, so up to March 2028, we are going to have more than 60% dividend payout ratio. This has been upheld as our basic policy of shareholder returns and if you look at the right-hand side of the top, we have the forecast for March, 2027, the current fiscal year, total 29 yen and special dividend is four yen. So ordinary dividend is 25 yen accordingly. So at the profit level of our current guidance, so if you do a calculation based on that current guidance level, The dividend count ratio becomes 60% based on the 25 yen. And we're going to avoid cutting dividends. So for March 2027, we have added special dividend of 4 yen. So total is 29 yen, which will be the same as the year before, March 2026, in terms of the absolute amount of dividend. And as a result, as you see at the top of this page, for FY2026, The expected dividend count ratio will be 171.3%, including the 4 yen special dividend. Next page. This is about our ROE. It has been above 20%. In the current fiscal year, March 2027, this is expected to be 24.4%. Under the current met term plan period, So, on about March 2028, the next fiscal year, we are planning to keep at least 24% ROE, between 24% to 25%. The page after. This page shows the shareholders' structure and the transition of our market cap. That's it. Thank you. Now, we will move on to related activities. I'm going to share with you some important topics. Tokyo Pro Market, the number of IPO support for Tokyo Pro Market has reached 60, and from Tokyo Pro Market to growth and standard such general market, there have been companies that step up to those general markets, and that led to

And it's not just the Tokyo Pro Market, Sapporo, Fukuoka, they have started a similar market. And regarding this, we have also got certification as an advisor. And what is notable is PMI, PMI Consulting, the SME agency, the FSA. They want to drive successful M&As. They want PMIs to be more solid. That is what they have instructed to us. But out of various boutiques, we are the only company that really is dedicated to PMI. There's a lot of need. Track record of providing PMI, 55, 66, and now it's at 132. But we want to turn it into 200, 250, 300. That is what we aspire for. And we want to do even more advanced PMIs. We need to do joint research with academia to do this. We now have launched joint research with Kansai Gakuin University. And when you look at our overseas activities this year, finally, we have achieved our 10th anniversary.

Very happy to achieve this.

We are smoothly growing our business and This will be a larger portion of our business into the future. We will continue to grow this business. And we announced this other day with Generational in United States, we also signed a strategic alliance with this company, five countries in ASEAN and Korea. And America, we will kind of spread this sort of a network. and over to the right, you see we were able to do an M&A with a UK company. That is another very notable topic. And when you look into our fund business, this is something that we want to make a pillar that stands along with M&A and we have established J Capital as an intermediate holding company and underneath J Capital, We have the J-Search or A2G search funds. So we can do kind of comprehensive fund businesses under J-Capital in this way. And when you look into some other topics, AI is a big topic nowadays. I believe this is very critically important. In order to utilize AI, It's about how much you can accumulate unique data. You really need data-driven business management. And in order to do that, in terms of data collection, that's something that we have been focusing on in a very full manner. Sellers, potential buyers, the interviews, business interviews, with agreement from We have been recording those conversations, and we are now turning that into a database. We also have real marketing, marketing roadshows. Seminars is something that we are very good at. We are doing seminars throughout the entire country. And in terms of regional marketing, we are also doing seminars. This photo is a radio broadcast in Ibaraki Prefecture. was doing a radio broadcast program that features me. And in terms of direct marketing, we have a regional focus and industry specialization, an industry strategy. So regional industry strategy with that matrix sort of structure, we will also continue to grow direct marketing in a very solid way. And this year is our 35th anniversary. It's a great opportunity, so we want to utilize this for our sales, so we can do many promotional activities. That is what we aspire to do. And through those efforts, the Guinness World Records, for five consecutive years, have recognized us the best-selling mergers and acquisitions company. That is how we have been recognized. And when you go into industry trends, there's just one item I would like to explain as the latest information.

There's a qualification system that starts from 2027. This is going to be implemented as a law and regulation, and not just that. Supporting agencies are now registered to SME agency. And that registration system is also going to be legalized. And so more strict registration system will be in place going forward. So we have examination system and registration system that's going to be codified Thank you very much for the presentation. Now we will move on to Q&A. We have a chat function at the bottom of the screen. Please input your questions from there. Please understand that we may not be able to answer all of your questions due to time constraints. We will start taking your questions. And before we start receiving your questions, we're going to share with you some of the questions that we receive often from investors together with our answers. First question. As a way of continuing to improve the qualities of the new sell-side mandates, the ratio of mandates acquired through our partners is growing year on year. But I believe that this means at the same time that the ratio of direct mandates where you don't have to pay referral fee is declining. Please talk about the advantages of growing The direct market is not stable. Because 10 years ago, in our industry of M&A intermediaries, there were only 30 to 40 players in the market. But currently, there are 450 to about 500 of such players. There was a significant increase in the number of players. And 85% of the current players were established in the recent three years or so. and those kind of new companies do not have their network. So they have to focus on direct marketing. They have to send a lot of direct mails. They have to make calls to acquire new mandates. And the outcome of their activities is that our potential sellers and buyers receive calls and approaches almost every day. And so our potential customers are fed up with such approach. Therefore, even when we focus on such direct sales and marketing, the response rate has gone down by a single digit or even double digit percent. And so we believe that at this point in time, it's better for us to focus on acquiring mandates that we gain from network partners. And another reason is Because of such situation, mandates in the direct market has lower rate of eventual closing as transactions. In our network, we have accounting offices and banks. These companies have been looking at the financial results of the potential targets for many years, and our network partners have the long history of tens of years of Working with the president. So, our partners have not only quantitative information, but also qualitative information, such as the character of the president and strength and weakness of the potential sellers and buyers. As a result, acquiring mandates through partners give us better successful closure rate. If we acquire mandates from direct market, as you said, we don't have to pay referral fee. That's true. However, the ratio of closing the direct mandate is lower. As a result, when we think about the productivity, productivity is better from network channel. However, we are not contented with that current situation. We have been thinking about how we can acquire more higher quality mandates, and we've been thinking about how to improve the customer response rate. And that has been addressed by having teams focused on some regions and teams focused on some industries. and these teams have been enjoying really good response rates because they have the strong trust from customers and they've been doing consulting sales activities. So customers' response rate is very good and also they can talk about really specialized technical topics and these teams are well penetrated in the target regions. So closure rate is very good with these departments So we are going to continue to implement these two strategies as a matrix.

Next question. You did mention that the closing of multiple deals was delayed to the next quarter or beyond. Does this mean that there were more delays compared to the usual years? Compared against the prior year first quarter, How much did these delays increase in this first quarter? Could you explain that using monetary value?

Thank you for this question.

So these number of delays and how they go up and down, I don't think it's that much of an increase compared to the prior fiscal year. The deal delays, there were 25 last year, about 290 million or so. This year, 16 and 140 million or so. That does not mean there are a lot of those delay deals in the pipeline. Last third quarter, fourth quarter, we did solid matching, and that has At the end of June,

The company had 635 M&A consultants. How many of them were new graduates? Do you have many turnover, many people who left our company, although they're young? So do you have the continued net decline in the number of consultants, excluding new graduates? And when can we expect to have net increase in the number of people Takayoshi Ohyama So this is Takeuchi to talk about new graduates. New graduates are included in 635 and 46 new graduates this time. And last year, we had 55 people, 56 people, new graduates. And last year as well, new graduates were included as well. So overall, we believe that the new graduates and other numbers have been growing solidly. and in terms of the net increase, actually we had a net increase as of the end of April, but full year, we plan to have at least 10% net increase and I actually feel that it's possible based on the actual activities of recruiting and retention and I myself have been joining 70 to 80% of the final interview and from 50% Recruiting agents, I get direct contacts. So I directly talk with them to shorten lead time. That's how our company has been focusing on improving recruiting. But as a president, I shouldn't just focus on that. So we record interviews and we get lessons from that and apply the learnings to the future interviews for the rafter and the rafter as well. We have such system in place. And to talk about turnovers, we also feel that our measures to reduce people who leave our company has been effective so far. We have 48 general managers and sales headquarters and 64 group leaders, total 112. And to new employees, Role-playing has been provided. Role-playing has been done together with group leaders and above. This is a system that we call stamp rally system. So we have been making sure that enough close communication has been made with upper-level people for new people who join our company, and also at least 60 points are needed from the role-playing out of 100, and then one stamp can be provided, and 15 stamps is required at least. Thank you very much. Next question.

In order to achieve Vision 300, in addition to the domestic M&A intermediary business, you've also stated that you would like to expand your business areas. When you look at the 30 billion yen target, is that something that is only achievable through only the domestic M&A business? Also, please tell us the outlook of the fund business and the overseas business up to 2032. Thank you for this question. For 30 billion yen, that is kind of a wordplay to 20, by 2033, March, the month of three, and 30 billion, so you have a lot of threes lined up there. So, and if we had a 3,000 yen share price, we'd have three Five threes in a row, it would feel very fortunate, but that's also something that the market is to determine, but 33, March, 30 billion, we'd like to have four threes. I personally believe this is a very conservative number, and we can achieve this with just our domestic business. When we increase headcount, and when we increase the productivity per head, have more people and achieve more through per head and in order to achieve more per head, training, reducing turnover and utilizing AI to provide support, those strings can improve what we achieve per head and when that grows and when the headcount grows, we can then achieve the 30 billion yen. And then when we have We can then add on the fund business and the overseas businesses as on that is the ideal state that we want to achieve. Now when you look at the overseas business, we have achieved our 10th anniversary and from this fiscal year we are now working on a growth strategy. My vision, 10% The fund business is about how much funds we can accumulate There is a lot of uncertainty. We need even further mid- to long-term viewpoint for this business. But the J Fund, the Growth Strategy Fund, and the A2G Overseas Fund, and JSearch, the Search Fund, all three of those have very solid signs of growth. And among those, the Search Fund, I believe it has a very high probability of success. And when it grows, I believe it also has the potential to expand. It has a lot of potential when it grows too. We are working to build this with regional banks. In regional areas, there is a lack of people that is more prominent than the lack of funds. We work with Hokuriku region in the search fund. We work with Higo Bank or Kagoshima Bank, Miyazaki Bank. We work for the South Kyushu Search Fund. And we want to spread this out to the 47 prefectures throughout Japan. And when we do that, we have a lot of breadth, width when you do that. And achieving success here can be Turn into large potential. That is what I am thinking.

Next question. In this past year, M&A sales per deal has been at high level. Can we understand that it has stabilized at the level of 45 million yen? This is a good question. I don't think that $45 million is the level that this M&A sales per deal has stabilized at because we have micro-cap mandates, micro-cap transactions that are handled by Baton's platform covering the kind of businesses that could be mom-and-pop family businesses. So through such efforts, we've been trying to improve our M&A sales per deal But the number of transactions closed, I believe, is not growing enough yet. We have to add more transactions we close. And when we close more transactions, I assume that M&A sales per deal will go down a bit. We are struggling to grow in the number of transactions closed. That's the reason why I believe that the M&A sales per deal is relatively at high level. and based on my gut feelings, we have to add more transaction closures and the appropriate M&A sales to deal, I believe, is above 40 million. If possible, we don't want to go down 40 million as average M&A sales to deal. But our focus should be on growing transactions we close.

Next question. Qualification systems and stronger compliance, through that we can expect a more healthy industry. But does that have any potential impact to your sales activities or to your deal closing processes? Especially when you look into the qualification examinations for individuals, it's likely to become a national certification, but could people need to spend so much time for that to prepare, and could that restrict those sales activities? Thank you for the question. This also is a very important question. Conclusion-wise, no impact. I would rather say this would push us into a better direction. So, the qualification system, I fully, in fact, I am fully agreeing with this. and in our company we are already starting to study for this and internally we also have started some examinations inside the company so we are already trying to improve the level of our people in advance and we are kind of building in the habit to study to prepare for exams and we are trying I completely agree. I believe this is a tailwind for us. When you look into the M&A industry, customers, well, the M&A industry has been democratized, so there's more knowledge in people because people are learning more and more about M&A deals. and then the knowledge required to us consultants, we need to study two times, three times more to really keep up with that trend of increasing knowledge. We have accumulated the data, learning training functions from the past that is going to be an advantage for us. But as we heard in the question, when you spend more time to learn and study, the time you spend on sales activities could be lost. I think that's where your concern comes from. However, that is why AI, Gen AI, needs to be completely introduced so we can improve our productivity. For example, I'm sidetracking a little bit, but let's say a single salesperson, when they visit a customer, they do a lot of research. They spend maybe 30 minutes, one hour, one and a half hours to do the research they need to visit that customer. Nowadays, so We have developed AI. We can build publicly available information into AI. There's this castle close to the customer history. All of that information, of course, goes in, but the latent information. What are the deals that happened close to that area? What are the trends of the deals in that particular area? All of that potential kind of information also gets captured, and a single salesperson can then look at that single-page report or a two-page report, and then have a very smart ice-break process with the customer, very productive. They can reduce 13 minutes to one hour of time, and then they can spend that time to improve their knowledge and study. So what I'm feeling right now is, when you look at large... They can use the power of size. Companies have accumulated data. Those can win even more at this time. So we need to continue to improve our knowledge with industry, and we are also doing some early investments into AI, but doing those AI investments to improve our efficiency is also going to be very important. Thank you so much.

Next question. Please share with us the balance of negotiation open mandates at the end of June, and please talk to us about the background of changing the definition of the number of new negotiation starts, and also please disclose the same count according to the old definition. I will hand over to Naraki-san for this question. At the end of June, the balance of negotiation open mandates was 480 pairs. The same time last year was 409. This was an increase of 17%. And Earlier, there was a question about an increase or decrease in the number of delayed mandates or the delayed transactions. In the case of the delay in our company, the delays are often due to missing some information in documents also or not being able to receive payments by the deadline, et cetera. But this time, on our IR document, We simply wrote that there was a delay in the timing of recognizing ourselves, etc. These are not really the project that we were not able to close because of not having good documents, etc. It's rather because of the real delay in the process. And so one indicator is the leading indicator. After the start of matching, self-buy side negotiation or advisory starts, etc. And as a result of all those processes, there was 17% increase in the negotiation open balance. And on Thursday, we disclosed about the interim fee we received in the first quarter, and that was $1,358,000,000 compared to $1,162,000,000 last year, same time last year. This entering fee received was up by 17%. This indicates that we have a lot of transactions that are under negotiation. And to talk about the next question, on page 10 in the center, we have some detailed information. And this is related to the second part of this question. Starting from this year, we have the We have changed the definition of new negotiation stops to talk about this. So the question is about the background, and this is on the third row. For the same sales size mandate, there are cases where they are negotiated with multiple parties, and in those cases, we started to count them as a single transaction or single mandate. So these are the cases for which multiple buyers have raised their hand. However, eventually, when the deal is closed, there is only one buyer, one-to-one kind of deal. So that has been the method of counting. But compared to that, we believe that it's more accurate when we count them as a single transaction. That's why we have started to change the definition to communicate more accurate situation to investors. To talk about the final part of this question, this question is what the number was according to the former definition of, for example, what the count was when we had three buy side mandates for a single sell side mandate. And about this question, I have to apologize, I don't have the answer that's really available immediately. Since we have reached planned time to end this session, the next session is going to be the final one for us.

So after the first quarter results, please share your determination and enthusiasm towards achieving your guidance for the first half of the year. Thank you. So the first quarter results, financials, the very beginning, as I mentioned, the leading indicators, are in a very good situation, that is what I believe. First, the number of back-orders, 17% higher compared to the previous year, and the interim compensation, we have a basic agreement that's also increased by 17%, so There are various transactions, negotiations, and process where you are finding deals. We have many of those mandates. So for September, we are going to solidly close all of those so we can then generate good numbers. In our company, we are also Thank you very much. can add up very solid results. So, we are very confident. Please continue to cheer us. So, thank you so much for your participation. And thank you for the many questions. Institutional investors, we also want to meet you in one-on-one meetings We will try to respond to your expectations and we will solidly manage our business so we can meet your expectations. Please continue to cheer our business. Thank you so much for your participation today.