Sekisui Chemical Co (SKSUF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hi, I am Kato. Thank you very much for participating in today's session despite your busy schedule. Starting on page 1, I would like to explain some of today's highlights, the message to stress. The result for FI2024. In FI2024, net sales increased by 41.2 billion yen to 1 trillion and 297.8 billion yen. Operating profit grew by 13.6 billion yen, exceeding the 100 billion yen and landing at 108 billion yen. Profits at all levels exceeded the January forecast and recorded highs. ROE was 10.2%. We plan to continue to grow sales and operating profit in FY 2025. Operating profit is set at 115 billion yen as per the mid-term plan, and we aim to record highs at each level of profit. There are some uncertainties such as the impact of tariffs and FX fluctuations, which I will explain later. But we've managed to set a profit plan as of the end of March to achieve the final year target of the midterm management plan. We believe our earning power is steadily growing and is driving our growth. As for shareholder returns, since the final profit for FI 2024 was 81.9 billion yen, as per our shareholder return policy, we increased the year-end dividend by 2 yen from the January forecast to 42 yen per share, or annual dividend of 79 yen per share. For FY2025, we plan to increase the annual dividend by ¥1 to ¥80 per share, the 16th consecutive FY of dividend growth. We've set a limit of 4 million shares for the share buyback and will cancel 4 million shares. Page 2 is progress of the mid-term plan. First, the investment plan. The cumulative total for the two years until FY2024 on the resolution basis was 195.8 billion yen. We had capacity expansion in high-performance plastics and capex for the launch of mass production lines for perovskite solar cells, and so increase in gross invest...