2018_2025_step_e

11/22 “Make-a-Subaru” Initiative－Sustainable growth based on focus strategy－

The next topic is the “Make-a- SUBARU” Initiative. This is the second most important topic, after quality, covered on the previous slide. For SUBARU, a small automaker, this is an initiative for overcoming the current period of major upheaval and maintaining our earning power. To accomplish this, as I mentioned before, the most important thing is for customers to recognize value unique to SUBARU, one aspect of which is quality. I believe that we must consider how to provide high added value recognized by customers in addition to this high quality and how to realize this with low-cost, highly efficient investment. As you know, enormous costs and investments have become necessary to meet customer needs for environmental initiatives, regulatory response, advanced safety technologies, and connected car technologies, but customers tend to be reluctant to accept and pay prices commensurate with those outlays. We recognize that in this day and age we cannot adhere to our conventional way of working, by which I mean each division doing its best to somehow carry out its own role: Engineering in charge of engineering, Product Planning in charge of product planning, Cost Planning and Purchasing in charge of product costs, and Sales & Marketing in charge of prices. This illustration in the shape of the SUBARU six-star logo shows elements necessary to raise customer value, with quality as the central focus. From a medium- to long-term perspective, we will add price and service to these elements. On that basis, we plan to start interconnected activities that coherently link all of our strategies, kicking off concrete activities in the second half of the current fiscal year.