Message from the President

The Hakuhodo DY Group has an unchanging values system that revolves around the seven principles of its corporate philosophy and the two pillars of its Group policy: Sei-katsu-sha Insight and Commitment to Partnership. Guided by this values system, while also identifying changing times and social trends, we have grown our business as a professional group in the corporate marketing and communication field without being constrained by conventional advertising business frameworks.

While leveraging our unique strength of creativity, we aim to achieve sustainable business growth by becoming a value creation partner that can contribute to the evolution of companies’ marketing. At the same time, as a partner to sei-katsu-sha, we aim to continue to create new value that contributes to social progress. By doing so, we will achieve our sustainability goal of “realizing a society in which sei-katsu-sha can flourish and live active lifestyles of their choosing.”

Over the past several years, the Group has been expanding the scale and nature of its business, including through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) aimed at acquiring specialized and innovative companies, for the purpose of enhancing its functions to boost its competitiveness on a Groupwide basis. Additionally, we have been strengthening crossorganizational functions to accelerate the transformation of the services we provide.

Cross-organizational functions serve as a shared foundation vital to generating synergies and building a Group business portfolio from the perspective of overall optimization while promoting collaboration between the diverse and multifaceted operating companies under our corporate umbrella.

In particular, technological functions are extremely important. As advertising business and companies’ marketing become increasingly digitalized, we need to recruit and nurture outstanding engineers and incorporate the latest technologies if we are to enhance our capabilities as a Group overall. In order to accomplish such tasks, we launched HAKUHODO Technologies Inc. in April 2022.

HAKUHODO Technologies functions as a core Groupwide platform for transforming us into a more technology-driven corporate group. HAKUHODO Technologies launched with just over 200 specialists but we intend to increase this number by roughly 100 during the period of the Medium-Term Business Plan through the recruitment of engineers, thereby steadily reinforcing the company’s functions. The most important aim behind establishing HAKUHODO Technologies is to add engineers to our team of employees, which has thus far centered on creators and marketing personnel, so that we can develop and provide new services and solutions for the Sei-katsu-sha Interface Market through teams consisting of these three types of professionals.

For our overseas business, in addition to further strengthening the digital domain, we are seeking to transfer and share the expert insight and know-how of the kyu network globally with Hakuhodo’s U.S.-based subsidiary and our Group companies in Asia. By doing so, we will work to enhance our competitiveness and create new businesses.

The Group’s greatest strength is, without a doubt, creativity. No matter how much the advertising business and marketing methods change, there will still be communication between people in order to sell products and services, and ideas are an indispensable element of this communication. Excellent ideas are what make sei-katsu-sha choose and use a product or service, and at the core of excellent ideas lies creativity.

One of our strengths is sei-katsu-sha insight. No matter what the business field, whether business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), and no matter how far digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) progress, business partners are ultimately people. To that end, sei-katsu-sha insight undoubtedly serves as the foundation for understanding how to inspire people, influence their actions, and build their loyalty to particular products or services.

The source of these strengths and of our value creation is our diverse pool of human resources. Our employees represent a base of eclectic talents with diverse backgrounds and personalities. By drawing on their individual creativity and enhancing it through teamwork, these eclectic talents conceive new knowledge and ideas that serve as the source of our value creation.

To further refine our sei-katsu-sha insight and increase the power of our creativity, our employees must be able to continue to grow in their day-to-day work through constant selfimprovement. It is therefore important to consider how we as a company support the growth of our Group personnel. Support for growth should target all employees, including employees in their late 40s and older, not just new graduates. At Hakuhodo Inc. and Hakuhodo DY Media Partners Inc., we commenced reskilling programs in fiscal 2022 that offer employees extensive learning opportunities, including acquiring MBAs or gaining expert knowledge in finance and accounting fields. By enhancing our eclectic talents to a greater extent, we will be able to reinforce our human capital and amplify our value creation, thereby realizing growth as a Group. We are therefore actively investing in human resources, including measures that will incur upfront costs in the near term, so that all the Group’s human resources can fully leverage their advanced creativity in everything from the digital and technology fields to fields that require global expertise. Through such means, we are further strengthening our human resource management from the perspectives of investment, development programs, and the building of an employee-friendly environment.

We believe that establishing an environment for sustainable management from a medium- to long-term perspective is a crucial issue. Therefore, to promote the Group’s sustainable management more proactively, in April 2022 we established the Sustainability Office, under which we have begun to undertake concrete initiatives.

Within the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) domain, we have established and disclosed environmental targets in accordance with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) as part of our efforts to address climate change. We have also started efforts to reinforce our foundation as a corporate group with a focus on 2030, the target year for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and 2050, the year in which companies and governments alike aim to achieve carbon neutrality.

Moreover, we have revised our material issues (materiality), established relevant numerical targets, and are working to formulate a human rights policy. We have also set into motion a task force related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). Details of these activities are disclosed in this integrated report.

With regard to our materiality, we have further revised and organized the eight material issues that we adopted in fiscal 2020 as important issues for achieving sustainable growth. Through this process, we have narrowed these eight issues down to three important pillars. These pillars are: Creation of new value by evolving marketing and driving innovation; Implementation of human resource management to allow our employees to leverage their advanced creativity; and Strengthening of corporate governance with the aim of realizing harmony with sei-katsu-sha and society at large. The first pillar directly relates to the value the Group provides, and the other two pillars underpin the core of our management foundation.

While continuing to cherish our unchanging values system, we will step up initiatives for realizing harmony with sei-katsu-sha and society at large, which in turn will help us enhance our sustainability as a corporate group.