The Japanese economy during the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023, generally continued to be unpredictable due to factors such as the rising raw material prices from continued depreciation of the Japanese yen, and economic impacts caused by unstable international situations such as Russia-Ukraine situation and slowdown in Chinese and European economies, although there was progress of coexistence with the novel coronavirus infection and normalization of social and economic activities.

In this economic environment, we have continually concentrated on acquiring new customers aggressively mainly through internet advertisements (paid listings) and internet search engine optimization (SEO), which can improve our website’s position on the search engines. We also conducted promotion activities including direct mail using e-mail and mailing flyers with optimized product listings for each customer, daily special prices. In addition, we broadcasted TV commercials to enhance our visibility much further.

Furthermore, the total number of our product lineup reached approximately 22 million items in total with 559 thousand items in stock available for the same day shipment to meet the increase in demand corresponding to the expansion of our customer base as of the end of the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023.

In addition, in relation to the sales of MRO products to large corporate customers through integrated purchase systems, both the number of customers and the amount of sales steadily increased. In addition, in order to strengthen our shipping and storage capacity in logistics, the “Inagawa Distribution Center” (Kawabe-gun, Hyogo Prefecture), which commenced operations in April of last year, underwent the phase 2 of facility expansion in April.

Consequently, we have successfully obtained 1,100,027 newly registered accounts for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023 and the number of registered accounts totaled 9,106,521 as of December 31, 2023.

In addition, NAVIMRO, which is our Korean subsidiary, also aggressively engaged in acquiring new customers mainly through paid listings and focused on increasing both its product lineup and the number of products in stock in order to expand its customer base.

All of our efforts mentioned above resulted in net sales of 254,286 million yen (12.5% increase from the previous fiscal year), operating income of 31,309 million yen (19.4% increase from the previous fiscal year), ordinary income of 31,538 million yen (19.5% increase from the previous fiscal year), and net income attributable to owners of the parent of 21,813 million yen, a corresponding 16.9% increase.