First, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to our shareholders for your continued support. This is to inform you of the Business Result for the fist half of 48th fiscal year (the period from October 1, 2025 to March 31, 2026).
During this interim period, the global economy remained uncertain, driven by prolonged and expanding geopolitical risks, as well as concerns over economic recession triggered by changes in monetary policies in major countries. In the stretch blow molding machine industry to which our Group belongs, responding to the increasing cost burdens at production sites of our customer due to soaring raw material prices and severe labor shortages has become an urgent management issue.
Under these circumstances, we have been promoting the "4S Concept," which adds "Saving Material" to the existing "Saving Labor, Saving Energy, Saving Space"—the universal strengths of our core 1-step molding machines as industrial machinery. In particular, our unique "Zero Cooling" technology reduces the cycle time for bottle molding while enabling container molding with less resin material, and is globally highly anticipated as a solution to current soaring raw material prices. With this one-of-a-kind technological capability that realizes the "4S Concept," the superiority of our products in addressing our customers' management issues has become even more distinct.
For this half period, as a result of steadily converting demand acquired at exhibitions into contracts, all of our orders, sales, and profits at each stage reached record highs for the half period.
Going forward, the demand for our products based on living necessities is prospected to show steady growth, and we will strive to further expand our business scale with our outstanding technology and sales strategy.
We also recognize that responding to social issues such as climate change and other environmental issues is an important responsibility for us. We will continue to promote environmental initiatives throughout our value chain, and aim to realize a sustainable society through our products, which have strengths in environment-conscious technologies.
We hope our shareholders will look forward to our further growth, and we would greatly appreciate your continued support and encouragement.