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The social structure and business environment are changing. For example, the Japanese housing market is shrinking due to the decreasing population and carbon neutral initiatives are expanding. Against this background, our group is working on the following key issues with a sense of urgency based on our Medium-term Management Plan (April 2021 to March 2024) to realize sustainable growth.
(1) Significantly Increase Production Capacity
We will build a flexible production structure with spare capacity to firmly establish a stable increase in our market share and to cultivate new markets in the future as well as to ensure we can increase our sales volume by steadily seizing business opportunities in response to demand exceeding expectations. Specifically, we plan to increase our production capacity by approximately 20% combining our Japanese factories and new U.S. factory. That increase in production capacity will also come in part from improving production efficiency as we have been striving toward until now. We completed work to increase the production capacity in our Nagoya Factory in March 2023 in Japan. We started operating that factory from May. In addition, we started operating a new factory in the U.S. in June 2022.
(2) Open up Overseas Markets
We have significantly increased our production and supply capacity in the U.S. for our flagship Moen Excelard product with the start of operation of our new factory there. We are increasing our sales personnel and strengthening our strategies to enhance sales of our flagship products such as Moen Excelard under this structure with its increased capacity. Moreover, we will increase sales in existing promising markets including China, Australia and South Korea while opening up the market in Canada outside of the U.S. market. In addition, we will develop new sales channels with an eye on the European and South American markets in the future.
(3) Open up Non-housing Markets
We are developing construction methods in line with the needs of our customers targeting non-housing markets such as for commercial facilities and medium- and high-rise buildings in Japan. Together with this, we are opening up non-housing markets by promoting our advantages which include the design and high environmental performance of our products. Those efforts have been successful. Recently, we received high praise for our environmental performance in terms of fixing CO2 by using wood chips produced in Japan as raw materials in addition to the design, performance and short construction period of our flagship products. Accordingly, we have seen adoption of our products expand to major fast-food chains, supermarkets, specialty store chains and rehabilitation facilities for the elderly. Furthermore, we introduced marketing automation in September 2022 to strengthen our digital marketing efforts.
(4) Expand Metal Business
Metal siding is used when renovating old houses in addition to when building new houses. We expect stable growth of metal siding as a recurring-revenue business amid a decline in the number of new houses being built. In addition, it is expected there will be demand for metal siding in non-housing markets like with our key fiber-reinforced cement exterior materials. Therefore, we are looking to strengthen sales by targeting warehouses, factories and stores. Moreover, we are also focusing even more on the development of new products and new construction methods. For instance, in October 2022, we launched our new Metal Guard Hikari series of products coated with a self-cleaning function and a new construction method called Layered Renovation for ALC Outer Walls.
(5) Strengthen ESG Initiatives (Environmental Response)
Our group announced our endorsement of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommendations in June 2022. At the same time, we set the following targets to reduce our CO2 emissions: reduce CO2 emissions by 50% compared to the level in FY2013 by FY2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by FY2050. We will strengthen our various initiatives to reduce our environmental burden in the future. We will focus our efforts on production efficiency improvement, fuel conversion and Carbon dioxide Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) to achieve those targets to reduce our CO2 emissions. In addition, our offset siding which fixes CO2 has been recognized recently. We were adopted for the first time in the fiber-reinforced cement siding industry for the Ministry of the Environment's Green Life Points promotion program for food and living. This promotion project issues points for actions to select environmentally-friendly products and services. It aims to accelerate the conversion to decarbonized and recycling-oriented lifestyles. We started the Green Life Point Actions in January 2023.
President 
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