Relationships with Shareholders/Investors

We try to make it as easy as possible for shareholders to attend the General Meeting of Shareholders, and take various other measures to ensure that shareholder voting is a smooth process.

■Earlier advance notice of the General Meeting of Shareholders

Three weeks’ advance notice of the general meeting is provided (7 days earlier than the legally mandated deadline of 2 weeks before the meeting date).

■Website posting of general meeting notice

Our early disclosure efforts include providing notice of the General Meeting of Shareholders on our website one month before the meeting date. We also work to improve foreign shareholder convenience by providing an English translation (summarized) of the notice.

■Provision of detailed information in the general meeting notice

To assist shareholder understanding, the officer appointment-related agenda items are accompanied by a list of the candidate names, photos of the candidates, attendance rates at Board meetings and similar information.

■Selection of date and venue of the General Meeting of Shareholders

To maximize shareholder attendance, traditionally busy dates are avoided and account closing/auditing schedules are considered when setting the meeting date. The venue was changed from our headquarters building to an outside venue for 2018. We feel this change improves shareholder convenience through easier access and better facilities, and we plan to continue using outside venues in future.

■Online voting

Advance voting is made possible both by post and online. For the convenience of institutional investors, NTN is also on the Electronic Voting Platform run by Investor Communications Japan (ICJ).

■Other

The Chairman’s discussion at the General Meeting of Shareholders is supplemented by summaries of business reports and earnings information presented on a screen with visual aids such as graphs and photos.

The Company has created a disclosure policy, complies with the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act and all other applicable laws and with the TSE’s regulations on the timely disclosure of company information for issuers of listed securities. We respect the Corporate Governance Code and disclose information in compliance with the Fair Disclosure Rule.
We also make efforts to ensure proactive and impartial disclosure of information that we deem useful to investors even when not mandated by laws or regulations.
We held a small meeting for sell-side analysts to discuss the full-year results for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2018 containing our new Medium-term Management Plan "DRIVE NTN 100" announcement. It provided a better understanding of the plan and ensured more impartial information disclosure.
NTN President Hiroshi Ohkubo attended biannual earnings briefings and quarterly earnings telephone conferences. He presented our performance and forecasts to analysts and institutional investors, and helped create dialogs by answering questions.Dialogs with a total of 292 analysts and institutional investors were held in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2018 through IR meeting such as private interviews, telephone conferences and other events.
Management also made proactive efforts to hold dialogs, including visits to overseas investors and attendance at conferences held by securities companies in Japan and overseas.
To provide disclosure to individual investors, we attended an asset management reporting meeting held by Sawakami Asset Management. The event helped raise awareness of our identity as a B to B company. It gave us the opportunity to present our business areas and strategies, and even exhibit some of our products.
We will continue to actively engage in dialogs with investors, planning plant tours and presentations of our work on ESG and other key topics of concern.

We have been assessed as an active practitioner of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), and have been included in multiple SRI (Socially Responsible Investing) funds and SRI indexes.^*1