Recruit Holdings Co Adr

Welcome to the Recruit Holdings FY 2024 Earnings Conference Call. This call is simultaneous translation of the original call in Japanese and translation is provided for the convenience of investors only. I'm Mizuho Shen, Manager of IR and PR, and joining me today are Hisayuki Idekoba, Representative Director, President and CEO, and Junichi Arai, Executive Vice President and CFO. First 25 minutes, Deco and Jun will provide a presentation followed by a Q&A session. Please note that today's session, including the Q&A, will be posted on our IR website after the event. Now I'll turn the call over to Deco. Hi, I'm Deco of Recruit Holdings. Thank you so much for your attendance. I'm impressed by this large turnout. Thank you very much. So let us share with you our financial results. First of all, at this time event last year, I predicted the hiring demand in the US. In May last year, we said that the hiring demand in the US would continue to decline for the next 18 to 24 months. And I used this graph. So in the second half, we thought that the hiring demand in the US will hit the bottom and we still see it that way. So we anticipate this difficult environment and run our business based on that. And this is what happened. This is the job ad data in the US. Around October, December, it showed signs of recovery. But as you know well, in February and March, we still see difficult numbers. So we cannot say that the demand has hit the bottom yet. So this is the situation. but it is close to what we anticipated. So the improvement in the business productivity and the product monetization strategy, mainly in the US were pursued and produced certain amount of results. And therefore both revenue and adjusted EBITDA were record high. Now, from April and May onward. The U.S. hiring demand is expected to continue declining. So HR technology U.S. revenue in March and April shows a decline in hiring demand, particularly among small and medium-sized companies. So in the U.S., we expect the job openings to continue declining by around 10% from the current level and run our business based on such assumption. Based on this outlook, we anticipate a slight decrease in revenue and through continued productivity improvement, we expect a slight increase in adjusted EBITDA for this fiscal year. for a recruit group as a whole, we will utilize AI to improve our productivity. So for example, in HR technology business, around 33% of the new program code in HR technology is already being written by AI. That said, I mentioned we anticipate negative 10% in hiring demand, and there is a good possibility that the drop will be bigger than that. So we will continue to prepare for that as we run our business. So the economic circumstances remain challenging, but we believe that the cycle of increased hiring demand will definitely inevitably return next fiscal year or the year after that. So as we've done multiple times in the past decades, we are committed to evolving our products and organizational structure to meet that future demand. So I think that is the timing we are in right now. Today, CFO Arai-san is also here, so I will keep the detailed figures to a minimum. As I mentioned before, We are now using AI to a great extent in our products. And so I would like to take this opportunity to share with you a video to show that.

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So this is currently being tested in the US and is being developed as we speak. We truly believe that this year will be the year when AI actually changes everyone's lives. We plan to continue providing new products that will make life more convenient for hundreds of millions of users around the world. We have also prepared a video of products that are actually being made and used in Japan. So please take a look. So second video, please.