Pentax 2013 Annual Report Download - page 10

From CEO
Copyright 2013 © HOYA CORPORATION
I believe my job as CEO is to further
enhance Hoya's business portfolio. Namely, to
strengthen and grow our existing businesses, to
identify what is missing in and appropriate to the
company and adding it to our portfolio, and to decide
to shrink or exit our declining businesses in a timely
manner. Obviously this is based on the long-term
premise that Hoya will keep growing. Being a CEO, I
look at our business portfolio as an aggregate of
diverse businesses and find it important to maintain a
good balance as a whole entity.
I believe that the information and technology industry
has passed the inflection point of its growth and is
entering into a long period of maturity. While it may
sink into a period of decline, we are not assuming
further expansion of this market.
In anticipation of this outlook, we have focused on
creating the condition to generate long-term steady
earnings for our related businesses in the past few
years. We anticipate that a decrease in the number of
players in these markets could stabilize pricing. In
addition to no need for heavy capital spending,
mature technologies should mean to lower production
costs. Combining all those factors, the related
businesses have fundamentally become able to
maintain profits. At any rate, we have created such a
structure by conscious efforts.
L e t u s n o w t h i n k a b o u t m a s k b l a n k s fo r
semiconductors and photo masks for LCD panels.
Change in structure of chips and other technological
shift and innovation can be expected in the future.
Nevertheless, the semiconductor industry itself
should be regarded as maturing. I am keenly aware
that Hoya's information technology business is based
on such mature industry.
Thus, I will continue to focus on creating an
environment that enables our related business to
maintain profits for a long time in the future. On the
other hand, in the case of a business in which we
cannot ensure a competitive positioning and in which
we keep generating negative cash flow, we may be
forced to select an exit strategy. This is what we have
done in the past, in case of business closures and
withdrawal. The most recent example was to close
down our history of more than 60 years in the crystal
glass business in 2009. When we assessed that we
could not become more competitive in a certain
business, we decided to make a speedy sale of that
business to the most appropriate buyer.
We sold the media business (HDD glass memory
disk coating) to Western Digital Corporation in
2010 and the PENTAX digital camera business to
Ricoh Company
in 2011.
In contrast, Hoya
aims to achieve
high grow th in
t h e p romi s i n g
L i f e C a r e
bu sines se s. I b eli eve our p re se nt bus in ess
portfolio is insufficient to do so. We need to add
new businesses.
Having said this, I also firmly believe that we can
achieve a double-digit growth even with the current
businesses alone. As we have various products for
the elderly, the global aging trend is positive for us. In
addition, our eyeglass lens business has merely 10%
share in the global market. We will first approach
many of o ur u ntapped ma rkets or custome r
segments.
We have just begun global expansion of our
Intraocular Lens (IOL) businesses. Many overseas
markets remain unexplored. In addition, our market
share for medical endoscopes is still small, while
those endoscopes have a great growth potential. At
present, endoscopes are mainly used for diagnosis of
lesions. In the near future, technological innovation
will shift from diagnosis to treatment.
4My job as CEO