Fiscal 2026 Message to New Employees from the President

UACJ Corporation announced today that President Shinji Tanaka has given the following fiscal 2026 message to new employees of the UACJ Group.

I am very delighted to welcome all of you here today. As president of UACJ Corporation, I would like to congratulate each and every one of you for joining the UACJ Group.

Today, all of you are embarking on your careers in the aluminum industry, which is currently in a period of transition. While our operating environment is changing, demand is picking up in the markets where we operate our main businesses, including beverage cans and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, so we feel confident about the growth prospects ahead. Furthermore, amid the urgent need to address global environmental issues, it is widely believed that aluminum can greatly contribute to realizing carbon neutrality and facilitating recycling throughout society, given its properties as a lightweight yet strong metal that can be recycled endlessly.

In light of the operating environment I mentioned, the UACJ Group is striving to supply materials with even more added value than before. Specifically, we are pursuing four strategies aimed at further broadening our value creation: promote recycling, expand fabricated material businesses, help stabilize supply chains in technologically advanced industries, and grow new businesses.

In each of the workplaces where you will be assigned to from now, I hope that each of you will draw on your fresh perspectives and youthful energy to grow and find success while taking on many challenges. I would like to talk about three topics that I believe will be important for journey going forward.

The first is the Group's purpose and vision statements along with the values that make up the UACJ Way. Our Purpose is to "contribute to a prosperous and sustainable society with technologies that bring out the innate power of materials." Our Vision is stated as follows: "Aluminum is our passion. It inspires our work in building a better world and healthier environment." To put this into practice, we formulated the UACJ Way as a set of basic guidelines for all employees to follow. It is founded on the basic principles of safety and compliance, and expresses our three values: respect and understand your associates, embrace honesty and foresight, and be curious and challenging. All employees are expected to follow these shared guidelines for action so that the Group can continue contributing to people's livelihoods and communities far into the future. Wherever in the world you are assigned to work, you should always be sincere when dealing with customers and strive to create new value with a future perspective in accordance with the Group's purpose, vision, and values. Rest assured that whatever you cannot solve individually can be solved as a team. For us to fulfill the Group's purpose, it will be essential that all of you work with enthusiasm and thrive on the job.

Secondly, I would like to talk about our five basic principles of action: understand how our factories operate, know our products inside and out, recognize how everything actually works, act rationally, and make decisions based on established rules. Let me give you a personal example. When my career began, I was initially assigned to a manufacturing division, and my first big assignment was to devise a plan to boost aluminum can stock capacity by six times within a single year in order to meet rising demand for beverage cans. I was advised to go to our factories to check our products and understand what was actually happening onsite. By doing so, I was able to complete the assignment. In retrospect, the approach I learned is based on our five basic principles of action. Later on in my career, I was able to handle whatever situation arose by observing what was actually happening and taking appropriate actions in line with the rules we had in place.

My third topic is safety and compliance. Safety is so fundamental that people routinely express it with a greeting in some countries. In Germany, for example, the word, glückauf, was originally used as a greeting by miners to express their desire to return safely from the mine. Similarly, members of the manufacturing industry in Japan often greet each other with the phrase, go-anzen ni, which literally means "stay safe." At UACJ, too, employees regularly greet each other with this phrase as a way of maintaining a shared awareness of safety. I would like all of you, as well, to wholeheartedly greet your co-workers this way in your own workplace, as it reflects our long-standing tradition of giving priority to safety in everything we do while taking responsibility for one's own safety. Compliance is a minimum requirement of all members of society. In business, we must fully comply with laws concerning health and safety, the environment, and product quality, while also following various rules, including our internal regulations as well as requirements specified by customers. From this time forward, I expect all of you to start learning and understanding these rules and make sure to follow them.

From today, all of you will begin your career paths as working adults. I wish each of you many successes in the future.