CSO Message

My name is Satoshi Ichimura and I have just been appointed as Chief Strategy Officer (CSO).

The Mitsui Chemicals Group has a corporate mission to contribute to society. We believe that a company’s sustainable growth is based on maintaining a balance between contributing to society and securing and growing profits, and we emphasize the integration of financial and non-financial information. This is also reflected in the organizational structure, where the Corporate Sustainability Division is not part of IR divisions, but is instead aligned with the Corporate Planning Division. As the responsible officer of both organizations that help drive and execute the company-wide strategy, I will continue to work to integrate ESG elements into management and strategy.

The Mitsui Chemicals Group’s policy on ESG promotion aims to achieve sustainable development for society and the Group by promoting value maximization and risk minimization in response to social challenges. We believe this is consistent with our Group-wide risk management concept of continuously applying the PDCA cycle of processes and measures to minimize the threat of uncertainty and take full advantage of opportunities, and developing an organizational structure for this purpose.

To explain this a little further, as shown on the right side of the chart, we look at risks and how we respond to them from three perspectives as our ESG challenges: the environment around us, the society in which we live, and how we as a company can contribute to those environments and societies and apply governance to achieve management that integrates financial and non-financial aspects. The world is changing and uncertainty is increasing. We believe that such changes represent risks (opportunities/threats), and that by identifying and acting on them in advance, we can take full advantage of business opportunities and minimize threats.

In 2023, our Group strengthened its risk management to comprehensively identify risks, for both opportunities and threats, on a Group-wide basis. As specific measures, we have established a Risk Management Committee and a system that allows responsible officers, as risk management owners, to identify a wide range of risks from their areas of responsibility on a bottom-up basis and to identify important Group-wide risks by discussing their importance from a management perspective.

From the bottom-up perspective, we believe it is important for every employee to identify risks in their activities and take prompt action. With regard to strengthening the system, we were also conscious of the need to clarify key Group-wide risks, our thoughts about them, and our responses to them, and share them within the Group and with external stakeholders.

In FY2023, we confirmed the consistency of the key Group-wide risks identified in the strengthened system with material topics and non-financial KPIs, discussed them in the Corporate Sustainability Committee, deliberated them in the Management Committee, and revised some of them. This chart shows the material topic associated with each key Group-wide risk in light of the risk scenario. By combining the key Group-wide risks identified through a bottom-up approach with the material topic identified through a top-down approach, we are reviewing and re-establishing material topic and non-financial KPIs that reflect both management and worksite perspectives.

In FY2023, we designated “Business continuity risks” as the Group’s most important risks from the set key Group-wide risks, and applied them in the FY2024 budgets for all divisions as an issue that both business and functional divisions should address. Specific measures are being formulated to address them.

With the new risk management system and process, risks that were previously managed and dealt with as tacit knowledge have been enumerated and transformed into explicit knowledge that can now be shared by all employees and managed and operated by the entire Group. On the other hand, the world is becoming more diverse and changing rapidly, and I believe that it will be impossible to turn risks into opportunities unless everyone responds flexibly to these changes as if they were their own. From now on, it will be necessary to deepen the discussions not only with management but also with those on the worksite, to ensure that the risks listed are not just a formality, and to establish a PDCA cycle for risk management. As the new CSO, I will work with the entire Group on this issue.