Message from the President

The operating environment surrounding the Automobility segment is currently experiencing substantial volatility as the trend toward electrified vehicles is propelled by decarbonization efforts and as technological innovations, such as connected vehicles, have advanced, as businesses based on new ideas arise from market entry by players from other industries, and as changes in the way vehicles are used are seen amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this environment, we are leveraging the strength of our complete, industry-leading lineup of mobility services (corporate and individual auto leasing, car rental, and other services) to advance growth strategies for expanding our businesses and strengthening our operating foundation.

Strategies to expand our businesses include the acceleration and enhancement of organic growth in existing businesses via differentiation through the proposal of high-value-added products and via customer retention efforts founded on the use of digital transformation and AI technologies to uncover customer needs. We are also advancing projects for achieving non-organic growth with the goal of supplementing previously lacking functions and expanding our business scope. Other business expansion efforts include redoubling our approach toward new technologies and decarbonization by means of creating EV value chains and enhancing marketing approaches through data analysis and utilization. As for strategies to strengthen our operation foundation, we will educate and train human resources while accelerating business process reengineering to achieve further improvements in operational efficiency using IT.

Going forward, we will take advantage of our fleet of some 700,000^* vehicles to strengthen our relationships with the NTT Group, the Mizuho Group, the ITOCHU Group, and other prime partners. At the same time, we will aggressively propose the introduction of EVs, important building blocks of a decarbonized society, with the goal of quickly amassing an EV fleet of around 100,000 vehicles.

We will also shift from a product-oriented perspective to a market-oriented-perspective in order to create new services based on an accurate understanding of customer needs and contribute to the realization of a sustainable mobility society that is friendly to the environment and people.

In fiscal 2022, we continued our efforts to strengthen the EV Value Chain from the previous fiscal year. We concluded a capital and business alliance with MIRAI-LABO Co., Ltd., which possesses EV battery diagnosis and evaluation and reuse technologies, in fiscal 2021, and began working with the company to build EV residual value models and battery reuse models.

In fiscal 2022, we formed a business alliance in July with Yanekara Inc., which has innovative technologies in such areas as EV charge-discharge management systems. In December of the same year, we jointly provided an official vehicle management system for the City of Kita-Kyushu and started supporting the introduction of EVs. Furthermore, in November 2022, we decided to lease a large electric shuttle bus through Nippon Car Solutions Co., Ltd. (NCS) to a multi-tenant logistics facility developed by Daiwa House Industry Co., Ltd. and owned by Tokyo Century as part of our efforts to expand the range of vehicles from large EVs to small mobility, such as electric kickboards.

NCS is actively working to promote the use of EVs, such as by proposing an EV package (EVs, chargers, renewable energy, etc.) to local governments that have declared to achieve carbon neutrality in partnership with the NTT Group in business operations, and jointly proposing EV introduction and EV charging management for customers in cooperation with Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd.

In addition, Nippon Rent-A-Car Service, Inc. (NRS) successfully improved unit sales by strengthening direct sales through the use of smartphone applications, and improving unit sales by setting prices to meet demand, as well as by strictly controlling costs, which we have been working on continuously. As a result, NRS was able to overcome the decline in business performance caused by a drastic decrease in mobility demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will continue to focus on product development that contributes to improving customer convenience and strive to improve our services.