Presentation Materials

Message from the CEO

For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2018 (FY2017), we recorded an increase in both operating revenues and income, which amounted to 4,769.4 billion yen (up 4% year-on-year) and 973.3 billion yen (up 3% year-on-year), respectively. Operating free cash flow—one of the managerial targets stated in our Medium-Term Strategy 2020 "Declaration beyond"—grew by 7.8% year-on-year to 933.5 billion yen.

In telecommunications business, we managed to secure operating income comparable to that of the previous fiscal year despite proactively continuing customer return measures with the launch of "docomo with" and "Simple Plan", successfully cutting down on the amount of "Monthly Support" discounts and expanding the number of "docomo Hikari" optical-fiber broadband subscriptions.

In the area of network, we improved the effective download speed by 1.5-fold compared to the previous fiscal year. In summer 2018, we plan to launch Japan's fastest mobile communication service of up to 988Mbps (downlink) in an effort to advance our network speeds to "gigabit" level with a view to the transition to the 5G era.

Meanwhile, we achieved cost efficiency improvement exceeding our full-year target totaling 98 billion yen as a result of our company-wide endeavors.

Operating income from Smart life and Other businesses combined reached 140.5 billion yen, exceeding our full-year guidance of 130 billion yen. The total number of "d POINT CLUB" members topped 65 million, and the number of "d POINT" partners grew to 229 with some 34,000 stores participating in the loyalty point program. We also achieved a favorable increase in the number of "+d" partners, which reached 468.

After the announcement of our Medium-Term Strategy 2020 "Declaration beyond" last year, we have steadily executed various initiatives under each declaration. In FY2018 and beyond, we will continue to work on the execution of "Declaration beyond" aiming for sustained growth. For more details, please refer to FY2017 financial results presentation material.

In addition, our ESG practices received high evaluations including the No. 1 overall score in the "Toyo Keizai Corporate CSR Ranking". Going forward, we will continue to promote ESG activities to realize long-term growth of our corporate value and contribute to building a society in which everyone can live with safety, security, comfort and affluence.

For the fiscal year ending March 31, 2019 (FY2018), we will aim to generate 990 billion yen in operating income and 960 billion yen in operating free cash flow. (Note that we have adopted International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) starting from FY2018). We plan to carry out a cost efficiency improvement program larger than the previous fiscal year of 120 billion yen to secure profits, so we can concentrate our managerial resources on projects that will propel our next phase of growth.

Specifically, we will tackle two main challenges; (1) "Business transformation centered on our membership base" and (2) "Growth investments for delivery of 'Declaration beyond' ".

For business transformation, we will break away from the traditional "mobile subscription" oriented approach and start pursuing full-scale expansion of a customer foundation centered on "members" from May 2018 onwards. For growth investments, we will make focused investments that will lead to new service creation, such as projects for developing 5G-related technologies/businesses, membership base and AI agent, etc.

Under the slogan of "Always chosen to sustain connections as your robust ICT service partner" we will connect customers and society with ICT services with an aspiration to become a company that can continue to offer new values and inspirations.

As demonstrated by the inclusion of shareholder returns as one of our managerial targets in "Declaration beyond," we have always considered shareholder returns an important issue on our corporate agenda. In FY2017, we repurchased shares worth approximately 300 billion yen. For FY2018, we plan to raise our dividend by 10 yen to 110 yen per share in an effort to further strengthen our shareholder returns.

As always, we look forward to enjoying the continued support and understanding of our valued shareholders and investors.