CEO MESSAGE

The DENSO Creed has been the starting point for DENSO since its founding. The ideals of our predecessors are encapsulated in the DENSO Creed. We have inherited these ideals and continue to put them into practice today. Moreover, we will ensure that these ideals will be passed on to the next generation. This entire process forms the basis of our sustainability management. As reflected by the phrase in the DENSO Creed “Provide quality products and services,” acting on behalf of society is our company motto. The spirit of this phrase is also imbued in the mission adopted under the DENSO Philosophy and the DENSO Group Sustainability Policy: “Contributing to a better world by creating value together with a vision for the future.”

Although the phrasing of our various ambitions has changed throughout the years, our desire to help people and contribute to society as a whole has always remained unchanged. Today, we are faced with the major social challenge of carbon neutrality, and it is becoming even more important to live in harmony with nature and ensure safe and secure lifestyles. Amid these trends, implementing sustainability management holds the key to realizing our Great Cause of contributing to the fields of “green” and “peace of mind.”

Specifically, in the “green” field, we are making efforts toward the following three areas: eliminating CO₂ emissions in our Monozukuri (manufacturing) processes, reducing CO₂ emissions by promoting products powered by electricity and other mobility products, and eliminating CO₂ emissions resulting from the energy we use in our daily lives. Through these efforts, we aim to achieve carbon neutrality by 2035, while also maintaining various other options for achieving this goal. For “peace of mind,” we will aim to eliminate fatalities from traffic accidents through the development of advanced driver assistance technologies and advanced safety technologies, and through efforts to promote the widespread adoption of such technologies both in new and already-owned vehicles.

To achieve the ambitious ultimate goal of “zero,” we will need to harness the collective strengths of DENSO and steadily implement a diverse range of actions one at a time. To that end, we have clarified the direction toward which we need to head and selected important issues (materiality) that we must address. Upon doing so, we determined not only long-term targets but also financial and non-financial KPIs, and have been working to make these targets and KPIs well-known at each workplace and among each individual employee. Furthermore, we have incorporated certain sustainability-related KPIs within the evaluation for executive compensation in order to provide a strong incentive for management to participate in achieving our sustainability targets.

Also, creating a sustainable society through the ultimate goal of “zero” is not something that DENSO can accomplish completely on its own. Accordingly, we issued sustainability bonds in 2021 in order to make our approach and specific initiatives toward sustainability management well-known to an even broader group of people. We also issued these bonds to accelerate businesses related to electrification, advanced safety, and automated driving. We will utilize the funds procured through these bonds to further contribute to the sustainability of the environment and society as a whole, together with our partners around the world.

In the same manner that our predecessors overcame numerous hardships since the time of the Company’s founding, we will remain committed to our passionate pursuit of providing use to society and bringing smiles to people’s faces. Guided by the ideals of the DENSO Creed, we will engage in actions on behalf of people and society while working to increase our number of external partners. There is nothing more I would like to see as management than to have DENSO become a company that truly inspires society through these efforts. I would like to ask our shareholders for their continued support as we pursue these endeavors going forward.

November 2022
Koji Arima
President & CEO