Nagase & Co., Ltd. will increase the consolidated sales of the plastics groups for the automobile industry to 50 billion yen per year in fiscal year 2005. The company plans to increase the overseas sales ratio of its overall yearly sales to 34%, which corresponds to 17 billion yen. Nagase places businesses for the automobile industry as one of its priorities. For example, in February last year it founded Design and Die Co., Ltd. (Inazawa City in Aichi Prefecture, President Shigeharu Tanaka, abbreviated as D & D), which deals with 3D solid design of automobile parts, in order to establish a solution business directly related to the automobile industry.

Nagase & Co., Ltd. launched its new mid-term three-year plan, WIT-21 (Wisdom Intelligence Technology) in April of this year and set fields related to the automobile industry, electronics, life sciences and overseas operations as its four key strategic segments. For the automobile field, in particular, Nagase has taken ten years to prepare the necessary organizations and human resources and continually strengthened its efforts toward creating an optimal worldwide procurement system. It is boosting the performance further with the Plastics Second Group, which is organized around sales in the automobile field, as the main axis. "We have built our businesses based on the concept of market-in with sales power to satisfy customers' needs," says Kazuaki Kobayashi, Director as well as Executive Officer, in charge of the plastics groups. Among others, Nagase has 26 unique strategic business units (SBU) in total and, 8 SBUs of them are related to the automobile industry, including lighting, die/product, blow molded products, interior parts, automobile-related business in the Nagoya region and total solution business with D & D.

In order to expand its overseas operations, Nagase has established D & D, which handles planning and designing of automobile parts, not only in Japan but also in the US and China. It has also founded production bases for injection molding, blow molding, die molding etc. in Canada, Thailand and Indonesia. Moreover, it has eight affiliate production bases in the US, China, Taiwan, Europe etc. The number of sales bases is 21 in Asia and three each for North America and Europe. There are many overseas bases related to the automobile industry. Nagase is particularly strong in overseas development related to automobile parts, where it handles everything from planning/designing to prototyping, mass production and distribution. Furthermore, it has launched field services at die production bases in China, where many of the leading automobile manufacturers are branching out.

The plastic business group expects to achieve consolidated sales of 159 billion yen this term only, among which 36 billion yen is sales related to the automobile industry (11.2 billion yen for overseas). Nagase intends to increase its automobile industry-related sales to 50 billion yen (17 billion yen for overseas) in 2005, which is the last year of WIT-21.