Sounds good. Thank you.

Conditions varied considerably across businesses, so it is difficult to sum up the year in a single phrase. If I had to, I would describe it as a year in which we reinforced the foundation for organic growth.

We saw improved visibility in our core growth businesses, including customer acquisition in nearline HDD substrates and increased demand for EUV blanks driven by continued expansion of the AI market. As a result, we also approved major capacity expansion investments.

In Life Care as well, we reassessed our earnings structure and strengthened the foundation for stable earnings growth.

Since becoming CEO in 2022, I have explored M&A opportunities, but we have passed on them due to a lack of economic rationale. We will continue to monitor opportunities going forward, but over the medium term, M&A is not our top priority given the large-scale internal investments already underway.

None at all. Our cash generation is extremely strong. In fact, we have even announced a policy to reduce excess cash on our balance sheet.

Yes. We intend to optimize our cash position over roughly three years, primarily through share buybacks.

Naturally, it is impossible to completely eliminate risks arising from external factors. The key is how effectively we minimize the impact when such events occur.

Exactly. By diversifying our exposure across industries, regions, and customers, we reduce the impact on the Company as a whole.

Even at the individual business level, we have a culture and mechanisms for protecting profitability through measures such as flexible control of fixed costs and passing on cost increases through pricing. By responding flexibly in this way whenever challenges arise, HOYA has never posted a loss since its listing.

Of course, we cannot sustain growth indefinitely through existing businesses alone. That is why we view business development with a 10- to 20-year horizon as one of our most important management priorities.

While acquiring new businesses through M&A remains one option, when I look back at HOYA’s growth trajectory, I believe there is significant value in combining resources that already exist within the Company.

I believe that by bringing together technologies across different parts of HOYA—such as optical technologies and mass production capabilities—we can develop seeds for future growth drivers. With this in mind, we are launching HILS, a new organization, in FY2026.

The key is that while HILS will fulfill the role of an R&D center, its activities will extend all the way through commercialization. Organizations like this often end up treating research itself as the goal. Our focus, however, is to work in an integrated manner toward product realization—from establishing concrete mass production frameworks to developing proposals that help solve customer challenges.

For roughly the past 20 years, beginning in the late 2000s, we positioned M&A at the center of our growth strategy and stopped developing foundational technology seeds outside our existing businesses. However, as I mentioned earlier, it has been difficult to find M&A opportunities that meet our standards in terms of valuation and profitability. Against this backdrop, momentum has been building internally to work collaboratively in creating new technologies and businesses.

This is not something that will produce results in just two or three years. However, for HOYA to achieve sustainable growth, it is important to plant seeds for the future—and now is precisely the right time to do so, as visibility for the medium-term growth of our existing businesses has improved.