2023 New Year’s Message

I would like to extend my best wishes for the New Year and to express my sincere gratitude for your exceptional support during the past year.

2022 has been a year in which we were forced to “defend” our position as the energy crisis caused by the Russia-Ukraine war hit our company directly. Faced with deteriorating business performance, including downward revisions to our sales forecasts, I believe that this was the most challenging year since the founding of our company.

In response to the rapid changes in the market environment, we flexibly shifted to an “aggressive while defensive” strategy. This included continuing aggressive investment in the EV charging business through the use of subsidies, while maintaining a strong defense and securing profits in the Platform business.

Source: 2022 Q1 Financial Results

In last year’s New Year’s Message, we positioned 2022 as the year in which “we believe that the decarbonization revolution will become a ‘personal’ matter,” and we set the goals of (1) expanding sales in the Platform business and (2) solidifying our position as the leading EV charging business in Japan through aggressive investment. While (1) was stalled due to the energy crisis, we are on track to receive orders for 3,000 charging ports in the upcoming year, delivering on (2) as promised. Although it is difficult to evaluate our performance due to the drastic changes in the market environment, we are able to see a way out of the tunnel of deteriorating business performance by focusing on the EV charging business.

Source: 2022 Q3 Financial Results

Unfortunately, we believe the energy market situation and the international political climate will not return so easily to what it was before the Russia-Ukraine war. In Japan, a country with limited natural resources, the importance of self-sufficient energy through renewable energy generation, nuclear power plants, EVs, etc. will increase, and GX (Green Transformation) will become even more important.

We will call 2023 the “year of the restart”. After the hardships of the energy crisis, we have managed to transform our business and profit structure in order to achieve renewed growth driven by our platform business and EV charging business.

In the Platform business, our role in choosing energy from the consumer’s perspective is becoming more important as tariffs become increasingly complex due to repeated rate revisions and market-linked rates. Although the normalization of the energy market is still in a transitional phase and we cannot be optimistic, we expect a gradual recovery in business performance.

In the EV charging business, we expect the installation and utilization of EV chargers to make a significant contribution to our business performance. In order to establish the dominant leading position in EV charging in Japan, we will aggressively invest in advertising, form alliances with strategic partners, and announce new services.

With regard to our stock price, we are very sorry that it has remained well below the issue price of 2,792 yen (after taking into account the post-offering stock split) at the time of our public offering, despite the support of many shareholders. In addition to the headwinds for growth companies in the stock market, we are struggling with the double punch of deteriorating business performance due to the energy crisis. We understand that the recent stock market is in a phase where business profitability is a key factor for investors, and our policy is to focus on strengthening our revenue base to reduce our deficit compared to FY2022 and to return to profitability as soon as possible.

Finally, I would like to share a bit of auspicious news. I have a unicorn statue displayed in my office to commemorate the 1 billion USD market capitalization at the end of 2021. However, it was unfortunately damaged in 2022, when the horn broke off and went missing, making it only a statue of a horse. I thought, “This is the embodiment of our company’s hardships.” During the year-end cleaning, the horn was found and the statue was repaired. We hope that it will be a symbol of our company’s “restart” as a “Wounded Unicorn”, representing our company’s continued journey despite trials and tribulations.

We look forward to your continued support in the New Year and I wish you all the best.

Yohei Kiguchi, Ph.D.,
Representative Director and CEO, ENECHANGE