Allow me to extend my heartfelt New Year felicitations to all of you.
In 2015, the OUTSOURCING Group was pleased to announce its entry into the Eurozone and South American market through a number of strategic mergers and acquisitions. 2015 was thus a milestone year in which we were able to take a major leap forward in achieving the core strategic objective of our Group-to shift our focus from the domestic market with its contracting population, to the global market where the population continues to expand. For we are a human resouce business whose primary driver of growth is the net gain in manpower resulting from this focal transition.
The Group is also rebalancing its domestic operations in order to achieve growth that is far more stable and scalable. We are moving away from our manufacturing outsourcing business, which is cyclical and highly volatile, and instead placing greater emphasis on our engineer training and education programs that cater to the IT outsourcing market, a business that operates under a different business cycle as manufacturing outsourcing and remains a growth center. We have concurrently begun staging outsourcing operations for US military base facilities and have launched outsourcing services targeting the convenience store industry.
As a result, the Group booked record highs in net sales and incomes in 2015, and projects to post a sizeable growth rate. However, we are far from being in the same league as the world's three largest outsourcing providers whom we intend to contend with even as we draw invaluable lessons from their successes.
Under our advanced organic growth strategy, the Group is committed to bolstering both its business scope and financial performance through such globally implemented initiatives as M&A. Meanwhile, we place the utmost importance on ensuring that the newest members of the Group, our colleagues from around the world, develop strategies based on expertise and experience unconventional to Japan and communicate and embed these strategies on a Group-wide basis. We also seek that they take a leadership role in maximizing intra-Group synergy in order to create even greater growth potential for all our affiliated companies.
That is the kind of enterprise the OUTSOURCING Group strongly aspires to become.
While the Group has consistently taken risks and successfully tackled challenges to date, we believe the real test lies ahead. We will remain bold and daring, and the results, we believe, should meet your highest expectations of OUTSOURCING Group.
We ask for your continued counsel and support in 2016.
January 1, 2016
Haruhiko Doi
Chairman and CEO
OUTSOURCING Inc.