Hello. My name is Takashi Iwai. I'm the president of Showa Giken Industrial, or "SGK". As you may know, we are a leading manufacturing company in Japan, specializing in rotary joints and swivel joints. Let me tell you about our past, our strengths, and our future.

Firstly, I'd like to explain my company's history. We started in Japan just over 70 years ago. In 1948, my late grandfather, Masamitsu Iwai, founded "Pearl Precision Industries", or "Pearl" for short, as a subcontract factory of the automotive industry. To develop our own products, my father, Masami Iwai, established a new company, "Showa Giken Industrial" in 1966. Our nickname, SGK, derived from the abbreviation of our formal company name in Japan, which reads "Showa Giken Kogyo". Pearl was assigned to making, and SGK to designing and selling. After expanding our sales offices to Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, our proceeds increased steadily until 1990. Our current factory was built in 1993.
As with many industries, we were also affected by the bubble collapse in the 90's. After great difficulties, our annual revenue rose to 2 billion yen in 2006. 2 years later, the 2 companies, Pearl and SGK, were brought together into the new Showa Giken Industrial, and I was elected to be president of the company at the same time. We've continued to grow since. After the recent worldwide financial crisis, we took charge of customer's services of "Takeda Works", a pioneer joint maker in Asia before they went bankrupt in 2009. As a result of our hard work and dedication to reconstruction of Japanese manufacturing industries in the wake of March 11th disaster, our sales marked a record high at 2.2 billion yen, or about 22 million US dollars in 2012. Today, our financial situation is in a comfortable place, with the current total manpower just over 100.

Next, I'm going to tell you about our strengths in Japan's joint trade market. Our 2 biggest strengths are customizing our products to meet the customer's needs, and prompt delivery of a variety of high-quality products based on statistical analysis. We watch our inventory numbers and money flow by not mass-producing, even if they're a well-selling line. Incidentally, about 70% of our sales consist of "made to order products" and "small-lot production ". This has allowed us to focus on providing top quality products for our customers.

Finally, I'm interested in training our employees up to be full-fledged technical experts who can prosper our company in the future. We provide continual on-the-job training, and offer support for external training and seminars, which include language study, manufacturing knowledge, and product development. We are always thinking about developing our workforce to continue to be a leader in the joint market. We hope to expand our network all over the world. Therefore, our new 5-year middle term business plan which started in Jun, 2018 states that our information-gathering and information-providing capacity be farther reinforced, in order to attain our mission, that is to say, "to support industrial innovation by providing high-quality custom joints to a wide range of influential manufacturers across the globe".