I remain deeply grateful to you, our shareholders and investors, for your continued support of SUMCO.

Fiscal year 2023 (January 1, 2023–December 31, 2023) was a difficult year for the silicon wafer market, which saw an overall drop in demand over the full year as semiconductor manufacturers continued to cut back on logic and memory chip production, faced with weak demand for their end applications including in personal computers, smartphones, and data centers.

In the first quarter of fiscal year 2024 (January 1, 2024–March 31, 2024), we are seeing a gradual recovery in semiconductor demand, as in addition to investment in data centers to meet strong generative AI needs, and solid demand in the EV and energy sectors, PC and smartphone demand appears to have bottomed out. Since, however, customers are still continuing with production adjustments and inventory drawdown, a recovery of silicon wafer demand is expected to take until the second half of fiscal 2024.

Given this market environment, the Group will strengthen its efforts to obtain earnings for dealing with the current situation, while ensuring our readiness for a recovery of demand by improving productivity with the help of AI, and building a production structure capable of agilely responding to market fluctuations.
In the midst of greatly changing semiconductor technology, the SUMCO Group will redouble our technology development efforts, responding quickly to increasingly high-level and diverse customer needs.

For the period ended December 2023, based on an overall consideration of the profit levels in this period, the future outlook, funding needs for capital investment, and the status of internal reserves, an end-of-term dividend amount of 13 yen per share has been set. This brings the full-year dividend amount to 55 yen per share, and total dividends to 19.2 billion yen. The consolidated dividend payout ratio excluding subsidy revenue is 31.0%.
As we continue paying close attention to the economic environment for the Group and earnings status, along with funding needs and industry trends, we are committed to providing our shareholders with appropriate return in keeping with the situation.