Hello, everyone. I am Hirofumi Ito, head of the Marketing Innovation Center in the Global Consumer Care. Thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedule to attend today's marketing strategy briefing. Today's topic, I'm sure you've all felt firsthand just how significant the changes have been recently, is how Kao's marketing is set to revolve in the AI era. Today, I will explain from three perspectives to help you grasp the big picture. First, I'll discuss the new rules for being chosen in the AI era. I'll explain how AI is significantly altering the entry points for choices in the customer journey, from consumer product awareness to the purchase process, and how, as a result, the competitive dimensions are shifting. Second, regarding Kao's power to keep being chosen, I'll explain how, amid these environmental changes, the new visualization marketing tool to be discussed today will work synergistically with Kao's long-cultivated R&D capabilities, our research data on daily lives in general, particularly useful for Kao, which handles various consumer goods, and the scientific marketing we have been using for over 50 years. Finally, I will discuss our overseas business, which holds the greatest potential for growth, and how these two engines, the new tool and the new organization, will drive our leap forward. I will incorporate several videos into my presentation to help you visualize these concepts more clearly. First, let's take a look at the new rules for being chosen in the AI era. To begin, I'd like to summarize the changes in the external environment. The COVID-19 pandemic, which spread globally starting in 2020, necessitated a rapid and forced shift toward a contactless society, triggering a surge in digitalization and highlighting the critical importance of corporate DX. Furthermore, the rapid proliferation of AI technologies such as ChatGPT from 2024 and more widespread use of AI from 2026 led to significant changes in consumers' purchasing and consumption behaviors, making it imperative for companies to implement clear strategic initiatives. For example, before the widespread adoption of AI, companies focused on how to deliver useful value and information to consumers throughout their customer journey, from initial awareness through searching and purchasing, to sharing word-of-mouth reviews. To achieve this, companies primarily invested in advertising to raise product awareness, and the key challenge was how to efficiently spark interest leading up to purchases. However, since the widespread adoption of AI, even in searching by consumers, AI is now collecting and summarizing information from the web, and by using user behavior data, preferences, various review sites, credibility metrics, recommend products. As a result, the zero-click rate, percentage of searches with no visit to a linked site, reached just under 70% as of April of this year. We are now entering the era of agentic commerce, where purchases are made through conversations with AI agents. We view this major shift as an opportunity for growth and aim to open new doors in marketing as well. We've summarized these concepts in an easy-to-understand video, so please take a look. From the era of consumer's own search and choice to the era of AI agent's autonomous recommendations. The decision-making process begins before consumers even visit a brand's website. Search, visit the site, purchase, and share. This process, which was once taken for granted, is becoming shorter, less visible, and more personalized because of generative AI. AI summarizes the necessary information, and options are presented based on specific conditions. Some surveys indicate that the zero-click rate, the percentage of searches with no visit to linked site, has reached 66.4%. Next comes the era of agentic commerce, where AI agents, taking into account consumers' preference, values, budgets, and usage scenarios, assist with everything from searching and comparing, to recommendations, purchases, and payments. What makes a brand recognized and recommended by AI? Simply communicating what we want to say is not enough. What matters is the evidence that makes you chosen by generative AI. Trusted quality matters more than the quantity of reviews. How do you answer consumer needs? Why can they trust you? What conditions should they use to choose? It's about being able to demonstrate these points scientifically. Decades of scientific expertise and superior product capabilities built upon them. The accumulation of this scientific expertise and trust is Kao's distinctive strength in the AI era. To enhance our power to keep being chosen in the AI era, and to extend that strength to consumers around the world, we are now opening a new door in marketing. As you've seen, consumers are changing. The customer journey from initial awareness to search, purchase, and sharing on social media used to target only consumers. However, in the AI era, we must deliver value and information not only to consumers but also to AI. In other words, rather than simply conveying only what we want to say to consumers, how we accumulate scientific evidence, the kind that makes us the preferred choice for generative AI, or quality that earns the trust of both consumers and AI within the digital space will be crucial for future marketing. I'd like to discuss Kao's power to keep being chosen. As shown in the video, Global Marketing i-Kao is a key tool developed for the coming AI era. We believe this Kao marketing visualization tool will accumulate and visualize data globally through various tools, thereby strengthening Kao's power to keep being chosen by both consumers and AI. I think it will be easier to understand if you see it for yourself, so please watch the introductory video first. Driven by the advancement of digitalization, consumer's customer journey has changed significantly, and we have entered an era where sustainable growth is difficult to achieve through the mere extension of past successes. Kao views this change as an opportunity for growth, evolving the marketing process itself with AI as the starting point. Our goal is a marketing model that captures changes faster than anyone else and scales winning patterns globally. At the core of this effort is Global Marketing i-Kao. It captures the brand status of each country, consumer voices, and market changes in a timely manner, connecting information from around the world into one. For example, AI-driven brand recommendation is a touch point that will have a major impact on future marketing. We are globally monitoring what kinds of brands AI is recommending to consumers, and we are advancing its optimization. This includes generating various types of sensing data that affect the customer journey in the AI era, as well as generating insights into unmet consumer needs required for the next actions. AI agents that understand these diverse proprietary data will further collaborate with orchestration AI to function as a single marketing foundation. It seizes market changes faster than anyone else, analyzes brand status, extracts winning patterns, and presents the next best action plans and KPIs for marketers to take. Global Marketing i-Kao will serve as the ultimate partner supporting our marketing model in the AI era. Furthermore, AI is creating new value in understanding consumers, which is the starting point of marketing. For instance, even when expanding into new countries or considering new businesses, we can dialogue with AI-generated consumer avatars to rapidly validate hypotheses. By combining this with the deep knowledge of consumer understanding that Kao has cultivated over many years, we grasp needs and business opportunities more deeply, leading to the next marketing actions. Marketers in each country and headquarters share high-quality global marketing intelligence across borders in a timely manner. This supports highly accurate decision-making tailored to the status of each brand. Information and winning patterns that have been connected by people up to now will now from now on be connected digitally, scaling globally in a highly reproducible manner. This marketing transformation will serve as a new competitive foundation supporting Kao's sustainable global growth. To briefly summarize Global Marketing i-Kao you just saw, there are three main concepts behind this visualization tool. First, AI recommendations and word of mouth share or penetration is visible. Unlike past data, which is only available after a product has been sold, it enables predicting sales performance in advance. Second, it allows you to know why it happened. Third, it enables you to understand and act on global data from anywhere. For example, AI recommendation monitoring provides both ranking and contextual understanding of the extent to which a product is being recommended by AI, allowing you to take appropriate countermeasures. The VoC, Voice of Customer, dashboard allows for centralized management of brand evaluations and consumer feedback on social media in various countries, market changes, and marketing activities. Consumer AI avatar research enables you to set up multiple avatars representing target audiences in markets where Kao has not yet entered to formulate hypotheses. To explain this from another angle using a 3C analysis diagram, Global Marketing i-Kao utilizes generative AI to visualize consumer insights, forge Kao's marketing, and learn by thoroughly referencing best practices from competitors. We then accumulate this as marketing knowledge. We believe this will also enable our in-house marketing personnel to grow together. Now, to help you understand why AI amplifies Kao's strengths, I will explain the five principles of product development, the foundation of Kao's marketing, and their essence. For over 50 years, the five principles of product development Alongside scientific marketing have served as Kao's unwavering guidelines for Yoki-Monozukuri. In the AI era, we believe that by reflecting upon their essence and institutionalizing them, we can gain advantage. The first is social significance for consumers. The second is exclusive uniqueness, which represents Kao's value proposition. The third is performance by cost, the fourth is consumer quality, and the fifth is marketing. These are explained as follows. This is the mechanism that gives us the power to keep being chosen by both consumers and AI. Based on the five essences mentioned earlier, we use marketing to turn technologies that deliver social significance and possess exclusive uniqueness, which serve as input for consumers into the power to keep being chosen. As an output of these efforts, we aim to build loyalty through high consumer quality and convert this into brand equity. This involves instilling discipline through ROIC and EVA to achieve cost advantage in performance by cost and enhancing organizational capabilities that generate repeatable success by creating learning loops. Let me explain in more detail about marketing, which serves as our power to keep being chosen. For over 50 years, Kao has pursued scientific marketing, integrating raw data from the field to derive principles through a loop of hypothesis, testing, and validation. As an output of this process, we aim to build consumer loyalty through high consumer quality, establishing our brand as assets. I will explain this using our four functions commonly used in the definition of marketing: create, communicate, deliver, and accumulate. To deliver value with high exclusive uniqueness, we have driven brand penetration through distinct strength. For example, Sofina leverages stratum corneum research and Kao's proprietary sebum RNA research. The Answer features uniqueness from 100 years of hair care research formulated with five essential hair ingredients. Bioré offers the efficacy of long-lasting uniform UV protection film. Curél supports ceramide function to strengthen the skin barrier and maintain moisture. I will introduce these values through the four functions used in the definition of marketing: create, communicate, deliver, and accumulate. Let me look at specific case studies for each. First, for create, Sofina's skin analysis app based on RNA research is now over 120,000 participants this year alone, which will lead to the creation of new brand customers moving forward. For communicate, The Answer leverages digital marketing to build evidence around Kao's 100 years of hair care research. By expanding its retail footprint, it has become a brand with high purchase intent and continues to grow since expanding distribution in 2025. For deliver, Bioré UV launched new products through limited distributors in Japan. Utilizing a lean startup approach for digital-age test marketing, it has expanded into more than 30 countries and regions. For accumulate, Curél, now celebrating its 27th year since launching in Japan, has seen its dermacare concept for dry and sensitive skin widely accepted globally, driving massive growth in the international markets. Among these, let me elaborate further on Bioré UV. In Japan, we have followed a lean startup approach for five years, starting with limited sales to specific retailers in 2021, fine-tuning issues, and launching nationwide the following year. Similarly, in North America, we launched test marketing in Canada in 2024, followed by store expansion in 2025. In the U.S., we began test marketing in 2025 and expanded stores in 2026. In tandem with this, we have also started test marketing in Mexico. As a case study, here is the situation in the United States for 2026. Driven by this year's global campaigns and co-creation with specific retailers, our store footprint has expanded, leading to steady market share growth. Particularly in California, which has a large Asian population, Bioré UV's market share in the facial UV care market surpassed 16% in May, showing exceptional growth. Next, regarding the performance by cost principle, let's discuss the importance of instilling discipline through ROIC and EVA to ensure a competitive cost advantage. To achieve this, we map the financial metrics of the ROIC tree to marketing metrics. For instance, net sales can be linked to psychological aspects like mental availability, whether the brand is recognized, easily recalled, or liked, as well as physical availability, which refers to how easy the brand is to find and purchase via store footprint and visibility. Certain areas like mental availability cannot be linked directly to financial metrics overnight. To address this, we use the Global Marketing i-Kao tool to visualize these marketing metrics, taking on the challenge of linking them further to financial results. Finally, regarding the building the organization that generates the power to keep being chosen, One Kao and two engines. This focuses on developing organizational capabilities that enable reproducibility by creating a learning loop to deeply instill the power to keep being chosen. To build these capabilities, we will strengthen our marketing execution system. As an organization, we will share and deploy experiential knowledge from individual brand activities across the organization, converting it into explicit knowledge to drive higher reproducibility. The lean startup market expansion mentioned earlier is a good example. Traditionally, attempting to scale this globally was challenging because organizational marketing support functions were located only at headquarters, meaning we relied on information transfer through individuals, making rapid global expansion difficult. From 2026, we need to establish the AEMEA DX Marketing Center, strengthen collaboration with headquarters, and promote partnership with major global platforms. These collaborations will allow us to drive data-driven marketing more robustly and rapidly by integrating Kao's diverse organizational knowledge and data into a single data lake, expanding and amplifying marketing tasks using the AI of Global Marketing i-Kao and leveraging its visualization. Now let's hear from Rebecca McBride at the AEMEA DX Marketing Center regarding their policy and goals. Hello, I'm Becky McBride, Vice President DX Marketing for the EMEA region. Our focus is on building a consolidated One Kao approach as a catalyst to supercharge the global expansion of our power brands. We continue to make strong progress with the establishment of the AEMEA DX Marketing Center of Excellence, the introduction of new agile scrum styles of working, and DX acceleration missions now live across all major EMEA markets. DX marketing is a critical enabler of the Kao global growth strategy. Our priority is to harness its power to deliver measurable commercial impact and profitable growth. Our mission in EMEA is focused around four major areas of focus. The first is growth, supercharging commercial growth through DX marketing, innovation and acceleration. The second is efficiency, rapidly evolving how we think and behave around digital media investments and creative. The third is relevance, pioneering new ways of achieving global relevance for our brands. Finally, data. Increased efficiency and effectiveness via data-driven digital growth strategies. We will also focus on building capability across the EMEA organization, putting an increased focus on data-driven, ROI-focused DX marketing culture. We're making strong progress in EMEA, with three landmark projects already delivered in the first half of 2026. AI powered content at scale. The new global toolkit for the restage of Goldwell Dualsenses has been created and optimized using AI, which has increased both efficiency and productivity. Agentic ready brand content, ensuring consumers can discover our products wherever they are shopping online, and a more sophisticated use of data to optimize our investments and get closer to our consumers to understand their behaviors. In the first half of 2026, we've run a live content creator initiative to increase new customers and grow digital sales. Working in agile cross-function and cross-market scrum teams, the project was delivered in 10 weeks, demonstrating speed and agility. The results are highly encouraging and we will continue to invest in this area. With the EMEA DX Marketing Center of Excellence now fully established, we will continue our close collaboration with Japan HQ to further accelerate progress in DX marketing. Thank you. In conclusion, while operating profit in our global consumer business has expanded steadily since 2023, we aim for step change growth to firmly face global players. Operating margin overseas is six points lower than in Japan. While we expand in Japan, we will raise overseas profit margins to Japan's levels. To keep being chosen by consumers in the AI era, we will leverage our two engines, visualizing marketing metrics via Global Marketing i-Kao to build organizational knowledge and collaborating with the EMEA DX Marketing Center to aim for step change growth. Through these initiatives, Kao is committed to bringing the power to keep being chosen to the world. That concludes my presentation. Thank you very much