To Individual Investors
Q&A Highlights
Highlighted Q&As at the Interim Financial Briefing for the Fiscal Year Ending March 31, 2025

- Q1I would like to know why inventory levels are higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
- A1We purchase based on our customers’ production plans, but market conditions in China, where there are many end users of industrial equipment, have slowed down, and our customers, industrial equipment manufacturers, have large inventories.
As a result, our inventory is also moving slowly.
- Q2Will price reductions be implemented to reduce inventory? Also, when do you expect to have achieved the appropriate inventory level?
- A2No price reductions will be made. The selling price we offer to the customer is determined at the time the order is placed, so there is no impact on income ratios. Inventory movement is expected to be slow, at least until the end of the year, and will begin to move around January–March 2025.
- Q3You have indicated that industrial equipment demand will recover in the fourth quarter, but is there any risk of delay? Also, what are the trends in demand?
- A3We believe there is a risk of delay in the recovery period due to macroeconomic trends after the U.S. presidential election and the impact of Chinese government subsidies and other policies. Customer demand is generally recovering, but it varies across different types of business.
- Q4I would like to know about the proprietary large-scale language model that you developed using Cerebras’ “CS-3.”
- A4Our proprietary large-scale language model uses Meta’s Llama-3-8B as its base model and is loaded with over 170 billion parameters, including a general corpus of Japanese and in-house product support data. We will provide in a form that can be used by many everyone, not for a specific application. We will also provide support for the development of large-scale language models for our customers.
- Q5Will increase demand for AI lead to more solution sales to government agencies? What is the outlook for sales prices and margins?
- A5Regardless of whether we are able to be involved, we believe that the number of projects themselves will increase.
The outlook for sales prices and margins depends on the scale of the system and the customer’s budget, but in general, margins will decline with an increase in volume, and we expect the same trend for the government sector.
- Q6What types of companies are targets for M&A?
- A6We will consider this from the perspective of incorporation technological assets that will extend the measurement, inspection, and other technologies we have built up to date, and incorporation customer assets to which our technologies can be applied.
- Q7Please tell us about the technological development of the PB business.
- A7In semiconductor manufacturing, multilayer technology is attracting a great deal of attention, and needs for measurement and inspection that are different from those of the past are emerging. We will continue to develop technologies for the measurement and inspection of new processes, such as advanced packaging processes, that will enable us to perform inspections with higher accuracy at higher speeds.
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