Interview with the President Growth Strategy No.1 In the ALL TOA 2013 medium-term management plan, we have designated core product operations posting an annual operating income of \1 billion or more as “core product operations.” While continuing to expand operations of existing core products, we will focus our strategy on aggressively investing management resources in the production and sale of products thought likely to grow into core products in the near future. In particular, the planned construction of a new acrylic acid production plant at Oita Chemical Co., Ltd., which is currently being pursued as a Group-wide project, is vitally important in realizing a competitive acrylic chain, to which all our core product belong. Construction of this plant is steadily proceeding with completion scheduled for January 2014. In addition, we will direct the concerted efforts of the whole Group into expanding our operations in the field of downstream derivatives of acrylic acid, including acrylic polymers, polymer flocculants, and the UV-curable resin Aronix. “Expanding earnings from core products” Growth Strategy No.2 We plan to allocate management resources on a priority basis to fields that leverage the Group’s technological know-how.such as high-purity inorganic chemicals, downstream acrylic derivatives, and functional adhesives. While accelerating product development efforts, we will take steps to expand existing markets and develop new ones. We will also work to raise Toagosei’s brand-name recognition in the field of consumer products, such as our general-purpose instant adhesive Aron Alpha and our Anjyu line of nursing care products. This is aimed at strengthening our business base and transforming the Group’s business structure into one that can deliver a stable level of performance that is relatively immune to fluctuations in the external economic environment. “Accelerating growth in scale of high-value-added products” Growth Strategy No.3 Beginning with the fully fledged start-up in 2011 of our two R&D units.the General Center of R&D and Aronkasei’s Monodukuri Center.we plan to strengthen our collaborative relationships with external organizations such as universities to realize faster product development. We also aim to create new products and businesses by aggressively allocating management resources to growth fields such as the environment, energy, and health care. “Creating new products and new businesses” “ALL TOA 2013” (2011.2013) 8 Annual Report 2012