Kao Corporation from Japan received the ESQR's European Award for Best Practices 2014 in Brussels

Good morning everybody. First, I think I have to disappoint you a little bit — I'm obviously not from Japan. I work for a Japanese company, but I am located in Germany. It's a pleasure today to receive the European Award for Best Practices on behalf of the Kao Corporation.

Kao Corporation is a global company founded 127 years ago in Japan, and we're headquartered in Tokyo. Today, on a global basis, roughly 35,000 people work for Kao in four different business sectors. Our main business sector is the Beauty Care sector, where we offer cosmetics, skin care, and hair care products both in retail and a professional market. You may know one of our brands, which is called John Frieda, Goldwell, or Molten Brown.

The second business sector is our Human Health Care, where we cover food and personal health care products. The third is Fabric and Home Care — here we are the market leader in Japan with our detergent Attack. The fourth is our Chemical business with performance chemicals and specialties.

Unfortunately, the majority of our sales is currently only generated in Japan and Asia, and we try to shift this to the Western world. Therefore, we try to take our Japanese success factors — or let's say best practices — and move them more to the Western world.

All these success factors are included in our company philosophy. Since our company was founded by Kobayashi Kokei, we always tried not only to look at the success of our company from a business point but also to improve the life of the consumers. When Kobayashi Kokei developed a facial soap 127 years ago, he also was looking at increasing hygiene standards at that point of time.

Our success factors are summarized in our company philosophy, which is called the Kao Way. Here we have certain principles and values that we follow. An important value here is called Yoi Mono-zukuri — this is a Japanese expression that means we try to take the feedback from the consumers to improve our products and services based on their feedback.

To capture this consumer feedback, we have developed our own customer feedback system called Global Echo, with which we collect the feedback and provide it to all relevant departments in all countries immediately. Another point is called Gemba ISM — Gemba ISM is a Japanese wording; it means we want to really understand what happens, what is taking place at the spot. Therefore, we sometimes go to consumers' houses and look at how they use our products, and with this we are working on improvement and innovations for the future.

Another point is Respect. Respect should be given in every company, but it's a pleasure to say that Kao has been named, for seven years in a row, as one of the world's most ethical companies by the Ethisphere Institute.

All of these efforts are underlined by our sustainability statement. Here I'll give you just one example: in terms of conservation, we look at the overall lifecycle of a product, including sourcing, production, use at the consumer, and the disposal afterwards. We have just recently implemented a project in Europe to reduce the number of packaging components we use. With this new project, we are able to reduce the corrugate amount by 33% and also the CO2 emissions by several hundred tons a year.

All of these efforts were only possible with the enthusiastic people that work for our company. Therefore, please let me say thank you once again. We see this award not only as a recognition of the way that we have done so far, but also as a motivation for the further way to improve consumer products and enriching lives of consumers in harmony with nature.