Pentax 2012 Annual Report Download - page 44

important. On this point, HOYA has proprietary technologies and it continues to
refine them.
Our expected role as outside directors is to monitor the proper management
conduct of executive officers from a perspective that differs from the internal
management team. For this reason I feel it's important to ask tough questions at
board meetings without reservation.
I sense even from a long-term perspective that HOYA is a company with a great
future. I sincerely ask that shareholders also take a long-term view in their
guidance and support of HOYA.
July 2011
Outside Director and Chairman of the Nomination Committee
Yuzaburo Mogi
Outside Director, member of the Nomination Committee, member of
Compensation Committee and member of Audit Committee
Itaru Koeda (Chairman Emeritus and Advisor of Nissan Motor Co.,
Ltd.)
As outside director, I am committed to fulfilling my
responsibility to ensure that appropriate
management decisions are made at HOYA.
I was newly appointed as an outside director of HOYA at the Ordinary General
Meeting of Shareholders in June 2009. Prior to assuming this position, I was
aware of HOYA's eyeglass lens business, the merger with PENTAX, and the
Company's high profits. Once I began participating in management, however, I
truly came to understand how different HOYA is from the automotive company
format where I spent so many years working. Unlike the auto industry, where a
company is focused on developing and manufacturing a single type of end
product, HOYA covers an extremely broad range of businesses, from the Group's
high-tech parts and materials to eyeglass lenses and medical-related products—
the sum of all these varied parts is the company we know as HOYA. Within the
business, authority and responsibility is distributed broadly, from executive
officers to business divisions, resulting in a truly efficient underlying management
structure in which division systems are firmly in place.
Looking back over fiscal 2010 from my perspective as an outside director, the
most striking aspect of HOYA's management is the substantial debate at
meetings of the Board of Directors. At each meeting, the five outside directors
from different backgrounds took time to ask perceptive questions based on their
wealth of knowledge and experience. In terms of execution, based on the concept
of portfolio management, decision-making about the allocation of management
resources was dynamic and timely.
In this type of corporate entity, I believe that stakeholders look to outside directors
such as myself to act as a safety valve to check whether management decisions
are correct from the perspectives of societal common sense. At the same time,
having come from an automotive company where brand value has a major impact
on sales, I feel it is of great importance in conducting oversight of management to
consider whether any individual business activities may be damaging the value of
the overall HOYA brand. HOYA already has strong brand value, and as I continue
my duties as outside director I am committed to fulfilling my responsibility to