Nippon Paint Hldgs Co Ltd

This is Wakatsuki, co-president of Nippon Paint Holdings. Thank you so much for coming to our earnings call out of your busy schedule. I will be presenting the financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 21 as well as the full year, and I will touch upon the forecast for fiscal year 2022 as well. On page three, you see the summary of today's presentation. In the fourth quarter, the company posted increase in both revenue and profit, both on Tanshin and non-GAAP basis. Increase in the revenue and decrease in the profit. And in China, as well as other regions, revenue increase trend continued. The impact from raw material price hikes was significant. Operating margin was 82%, which is an improvement from 6.8% in the third quarter. Even if we reverse the provisions in China, there was an improvement year on year. On page 4, for the full year of fiscal year 2021, the revenue was 998.3 billion yen, aligned with the guidance. Operating profit was 87.6 billion yen, which was approximately 10% higher than the 80 billion yen forecast we announced in October. The growth rate on Tamsin basis was 29.2%. and excluding new conservations and foreign exchange impact, there was still a significant growth at 16.6%. If we exclude only 54.5 billion yen of foreign exchange impact on the Tanshin basis, there was a growth of approximately 22%. This means that we are growing steadily through M&A in addition to the strong organic growth that we are aiming to have as a foundation of the company. On the other hand, the profit was regrettably flat to the previous year. As I have continuously been saying since last year, temporary costs incurred from making our Asian joint venture our wholly owned subsidiary, including the stamp tax, was about 5 billion yen. In addition, there was a provision of China of 3.2 billion yen, and considering the negatives from the raw material price hike, this was not too bad. However, there is still room for improvement. For net profit, There was no outflow of 49% of profit from Asian joint venture that we had in the previous year. And so there was this added to the contribution from this continuing business of 67.6 billion yen. The growth was over 50% year-on-year. We have also issued new shares, and the EPS was 7.4%. Page 5, the full-year forecast for fiscal year 2022 is 1.2 trillion yen in revenue, operating profit of 115 billion yen, which are growth of 28% and 30% respectively. For profit, in addition to growth in revenue, we will see removal of temporary factors and expect improvement in the margin. That is why we expect a higher growth. Annual dividend is expected to be 11 yen, up 2 yen from the previous year, for we aim 30% dividend payout ratio. There are four points I would like to add to this forecast. The first point is that we expect raw material costs to continue to increase up to the first half of this year. The margin in the first quarter will be closer to the fourth quarter of fiscal year 21 levels. However, because we will have more prevalent impact from price increase, we expect recovery from the second quarter on. In the first quarter of last year, In fiscal year 21, there was a positive impact from the carryover effect of lower raw material costs from the previous year. Due to that, on a year-on-year basis, we will see increase in the revenue but decline in the profit year-on-year. We expect positive growth for both revenue and profit from second quarter on. So the image of that is on page 29 of the material. So please refer to that when you have time. The second point on page six, it is related to acquisition of chromology. As you can see, it contributed little less than 100 billion yen in revenue. So in terms of the margin, Without amortization of intangible assets and transaction costs related to acquisition, it will be around 7.5% to 8.5%. As a result, the contribution in operating profit after deducting the cost in consolidating is approximately 5 billion yen. As a result, it would be 1.1 trillion yen in revenue in the existing business, excluding chronology. and about 110 billion yen in operating profit. This is just to give you a rough idea. The third point. We have not included the numbers for JUB in Slovenia. The YUB company is not included. And we announced making automotive parts business in China wholly owned subsidiary in November. It will contribute solely on the net profit since it was already a consolidated subsidiary, but it is not included here either. The work towards closing is going smoothly, and we expect closing to occur in the first half of this year. It contributes positively to revenue and profit, but it is insignificant considering the overall business. Because we don't have the visibility to when the transaction will close, we have not included that.

Finally, the fourth point is about expense allocation to Japan business. Until 2020, in our disclosure, all head office expenses were included in Japan's segment. In 2021, or last fiscal year, head office expenses were separated as a reconciliation item. Domestic companies had already signed service agreements with Nippon Paint Holdings, or NPHD, but since NP Corporate Solution was established this time around, we plan to separate domestic business expenses and head office expenses more strictly so that we can clarify the functions of NPCS to better visualize things. Through this process, we expect that the expense allocation to Japan segment will increase and reconciliation will decrease. So on a consolidated basis, there will be no major Next, on page 7, I have already mentioned raw material market conditions. Gross profit margin declined 4.3% year-on-year, but gross profit margin improved 0.8% compared with the last quarter. On page 8, I have already mentioned this as well. I talked about this last year. In May this year, we are going to realign our reporting segments, including chromology, but we plan to make a disclosure in such a way that you can make comparisons with our past performances. So we would appreciate your continuous feedback. Page 9. This page talks about a secondary offering of shares which took place last month. Despite the fact that we did not issue new shares, the share price dropped as much as 24% from launch through pricing, which was very unfortunate. Our share liquidity is relatively low, only at 0.1% of our market cap in terms of our daily trading volume, and institutional investors had told us that it was hard for them to trade our shares. As such, resolving this situation had been one of our management challenges. At the same time, some of our shareholders, mainly financial institutions, had intended to reduce their strategic shareholdings, so our interests were in line with theirs. So we took the approach of secondary offerings through which we intended to increase the liquidity, gain global investors, and repel the concerns of additional selling And we have been able to make a major progress. I believe that our growth potential continues to be very high. So while laying the path to profitability improvement, we would like to deepen our dialogue with investors. So thank you very much for your continuous support and advice. Page 11 and 12, against this backdrop, it is reassuring to see that our IR website have received better evaluations from our third parties and our China brands have continued to be highly appreciated. Finally, on page 13, you can see the new candidates for directors to be proposed at the AGM scheduled for the end of this coming March. Last year, immediately after AGM in April, a president was replaced. As such, we, Shu Kim and myself, two co-presidents, will join the board from the executive side. Also, we have been able to secure two excellent outside director candidates. Mr. Peter Kirby is a well-versed in the paint industry and Mr. Lim Feefor has rich experiences in the finance industry. And both of them should be able to contribute global and diverse points of view to the board to realize MSV. I believe that there are a lot of questions, but this is all for my presentation. So I'd like to conclude my talk. But there is one more point I'd like to mention. Regarding the progress of a mid-term management plan announced last March, we are planning to give you a separate update sometime in the middle of next month. So I'm looking forward to having a conversation with you at that occasion. Thank you very much.