Message from the President

We will continue to adhere to the ethos of our founder. Specifically, we will be a visionary leader, we will act with integrity, we will value diversity, and we will all continue to take on challenges with passion.

My name is Masahiro Okafuji, and I am the President and Chief Executive Officer of ITOCHU Corporation.

On May 6, we announced our financial results for fiscal 2011 and our two-year Medium-Term Management Plan covering fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2013.

In fiscal 2011, we took the bold step of writing off all the bad assets in advance, determined not to carry matters of concern into subsequent fiscal years. Even so, net income increased 32.8 billion yen from fiscal 2010 to 161 billion yen, meeting our initial target of 160 billion yen.

We named our new Medium-Term Management Plan "Brand-new Deal 2012" based on our resolve to reshape ITOCHU entirely, making a break from the past. The phrase combines "brand-new" meaning entirely fresh, with "new deal" meaning new strategies or initiatives, and we will aim to use this as ITOCHU's new slogan. We adopted "strengthening our front-line capabilities" "proactively seeking new opportunities" and "expanding our scale of operations" as the basic policies to be pursued under the Brand-new Deal 2012 plan, and all executive officers and employees will work with renewed vigor to put the three tenets of the plan—Earning, Cutting, and Preventing—into practice.

Please visit the relevant section of this website for a summary of our financial results for fiscal 2011 and details of our New Medium-Term Management Plan.

Finally, I would like to mention our policy for returning profits to shareholders. Under the new Medium-Term Management Plan, our annual dividend targets will be a dividend payout ratio of 20% on net income of up to 200 billion yen, and a dividend payout ratio of 30% on the portion of net income exceeding 200 billion yen. With target net income in fiscal 2012 of 240 billion yen, the annual dividend per share would be 33 yen, an increase of 15 yen compared with fiscal 2011, and the dividend payout ratio would be 21.7%.

ITOCHU Corporation remains committed to striving to meet the expectations of all its stakeholders, and I sincerely ask for your continued support and encouragement.