By The following "New Year Message 2014" was addressed to all officers and employees by President Jun Karube.
--- Message ---
Happy New Year. As we welcome a brand new year, I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on the past year and to express three main activities for this year.
Reflections on 2013
The past year was a time of profound transition for the global economy. And that transition profoundly affected the business environment for the TTC Group.
Economic trends have been generally positive in the world's industrialized nations. The European economy is finally emerging from its prolonged stagnation and is entering recovery mode. The US economy, meanwhile, is growing at a rising pace. That growth has occurred despite the US government's flirtation last year with the fiscal cliff. And it reflects contributions from technological advances, including extraction technology for shale gas.
We have witnessed a slowing of economic growth in principal emerging economies, including China, India, and the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). China's slowing growth has resulted at least partly from structural reforms adopted by the government to head off economic overheating. The slowing growth in India has resulted from the government's lagging commitment to fiscal reform and from interest rate hikes undertaken despite the economic weakening. In Southeast Asia, growth has slowed most of the larger members of ASEAN, including Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. But we expect those nations and the world's other emerging economies to remain drivers of global economic growth over the long term.
The economic picture in Japan is a composite of mixed trends. Japan has largely overcome the economic setback of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, and economic vitality has benefited from successful measures to correct the overly strong yen of recent years. Clouding the economic outlook, however, is the stubborn worsening of Sino-Japanese relations.
Along with the macroeconomic trends that I have described, the automotive industry, our main business domain is reshaping operations and revamping the organization in response to changes in their markets and industry. We need to support the moves under way in the industry by upgrading our capacity for offering value-added functions. And we need to help reinforce customers' business foundation by outpacing our competitors in cultivating markets in emerging economies.
More broadly, we need to fortify our overall potential for sustainable growth. We took important steps in that direction last year. Our measures included laying a foundation for fostering synergies with CFAO. They also included strengthening our approach to developing business in next-generation growth markets in Africa, in the Mekong River basin, and in other regions. Our measures for attaining sustainable growth need to span a widening horizon of outreach to customers and partners beyond the automotive sector. And stepped-up activity in next-generation growth markets will figure prominently in that outreach.
Our activities in 2014
We are moving steadily toward fulfilling our Global 2020 Vision. We are making substantive progress toward achieving sustainable growth, and we are within sight of our goal of posting annual net earnings of 100 billion.
That brings me to the subject of our activities in 2014. I will focus here on three items.
Firstly, we will vigorously pursue growth with measures for reinforcing our operational and financial stability. Our efforts to increase earnings will mean abiding by our growth-oriented stance. We need to underpin that stance with a solid foundation. We will devote heightened attention this year to the need for strengthening that foundation.
Take a good look at the business for which we are responsible and do what is necessary to help ensure reliable profitability.
