Message from the President

At the start of the 1970s, the report Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind released by the Club of Rome warned that the human race would reach the limits of growth within 100 years due to factors such as global population growth, resource depletion and environmental pollution. Today, 40 years later, the world is seeing the emergence of the BRICs nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which account for about one-half the world’s population, and the limits of the environment, energy and food supply are becoming more clear, as the “predicament of mankind” has become reality.

The environment with water, energy and food supply all are essential elements in the sustainable society that humanity seeks to achieve. This is because a look at past history shows that civilizations that have failed to preserve any of these all have disappeared.
Learning a lesson from two times oil shocks, Japan has realized the world’s highest level of energy efficiency through striving to use resources effectively and to conserve energy, chiefly in industry. Today, the petroleum industry is aiming to realize a low-carbon society with balance between the environment and the economy, through intensive, effective use of petroleum and adoption of renewable energy sources, as a further step forward in such efforts.

While forecasts call for decreased demand for petroleum in Japan due to factors such as a decreasing population and countermeasures against global warming, even in 2030 petroleum will play an important role as a primary energy source. Petroleum also would be a last resort as an energy source for the people, increasing its status to alternate nuclear power and renewable energy, in connection with instability in their supply.
In the future as well, ensuring a stable domestic supply of energy sources such as petroleum and coal will remain an important responsibility of Idemitsu and the pillar of its business. At the same time, in overseas markets such as Asia, which is characterized by marked economic growth, Idemitsu will work to grow as a company while contributing to the development of emerging markets through deploying a variety of business activities in areas such as lubricants, petrochemical products, electronic materials and agricultural biotechnology, together with putting to use the technologies and expertise it has built up through today.

Idemitsu’s founder Sazo Idemitsu established the company setting forth a management philosophy of “respect for human beings.” Under the philosophy, the essence of business lies in the practice of seeing society as something created by human beings and human beings as playing the central role in business conducted in that society, and developing within the company human resources who will be trusted and respected by society, and contributing to society through business. In the future as well, under this philosophy Idemitsu will contribute to the development of a society with harmony between the economy and the environment, through securing energy sources and putting them to effective use and, furthermore, through development of functional materials and other activities.