Akio Yoshida
President, Representative Executive Officer & Director

My name is Yoshida from Aeon. Thank you very much for coming out of your busy schedules this afternoon.

I would like to talk about the new medium-term management plan that runs for 5 years starting from this fiscal year '26 to fiscal year '30. This is the agenda for today. There are two parts. First, I would like to talk about the background to how we built the new medium-term management plan based on the business foundation we built in the last midterm plan. Also, I will talk about the directionality of the reform we aim at achieving.

After that, I will talk about the business strategy that forms the new medium-term management plan as well as finance strategy, including cash allocation. So I hope to have 40 minutes of your time. First, the foundation of our new midterm plan is the previous midterm plan. So let me look back at what we have done there. From a quantitative perspective, the company came close to a targeted level of operating revenue.

On the other hand, we underachieved in profit, including impact of COVID starting of inflation, the business environment changed in a way that was not expected at the time we created the midterm plan. There was an increase in labor cost by JPY 140 billion and utility costs rose by JPY 50 billion. In total, the cost increased by approximately JPY 190 billion. The result at the end of the final year of the midterm plan reflects those unexpected happenings. However, the 5 reforms that we set out in the