Vision and Strategy

As global warming becomes more serious, and there arises concern about the depletion of resources, and about the ecosystem being in crisis, global environmental issues have become the biggest social problems we have to address as a global community. We have long been carrying out our business activities following a management philosophy of “contributing to society.” In this regard, we at Panasonic want to lead the industry in bringing about a “green revolution,” and we also want to make a contribution starting in an area which affects the day-to-day lives of people, a contribution worthy of Panasonic. Having such a goal firmly in mind, we set our vision looking to the 100th anniversary of our founding, and announced it at our Annual Management Policy Meeting on January 18, 2010. By fiscal 2019, the 100th anniversary of our founding, we aim to become the No. 1 Green Innovation Company in the Electronics Industry. We will make the “environment” central to all of our business activities and bring forth “Green Life Innovation” and “Green Business Innovation.”

• Vision

When we made our vision looking to the 100th anniversary of our founding, we set down “Indexes for the No.1 Green Innovation Company in the Electronics Industry,” consisting of two kinds of management indexes. The first is “Global Excellence Indexes,” which contain our global management targets, such as our sales and operating profit ratio. The second is “Green Indexes,” which consist of four items, namely our “contribution to reducing CO₂ emissions,” our “contribution to recycling resources,” the “size of our Energy Systems Business,” and the “percentage of sales for No.1 eco-conscious products.” We will work to always meet the “Global Excellence Indexes,”and at the same time we aim to become industry No.1 for the four items in the “Green Indexes” taken as a whole. By simultaneously pursing these indexes, we will integrate our environmental contribution and our business growth throughout the entire Group.

Toward the attainment of our 100th anniversary vision, we have renewed our ‘ eco ideas’ Declaration to focus on ‘ eco ideas’ for Lifestyles and ‘ eco ideas’ for Business-styles.

For the period from fiscal 2011 to 2013, during which we will take the first steps toward achieving the vision looking to the 100th anniversary of our founding, we will implement our midterm management plan, GT12 (Green Transformation 2012) to make a paradigm shift for growth and to lay the foundation to be a Green Innovation Company. During those three years we will strive to increase our profitability and make more environmental contributions through the growth of our six key businesses including our flagship Energy System Business, thereby meeting the Global Excellence Indexes and laying the groundwork to become No. 1 in terms of Green Indexes.

Moreover in April 2011, we made Panasonic Electric Works and SANYO Electric our wholly-owned subsidiaries, with a view to speeding up and maximizing synergy creation in order to achieve the GT12 plan. Based on this new organizational structure, we will carry out the entire Panasonic Group’ s reorganization and promote a new growth strategy. Starting from January 2012, under the new business domain organization, we will accelerate the expansion of our business related to photovoltaic power generation, lithium-ion batteries, energy management systems, etc.

In fiscal 2011, we formulated the Green Plan 2018 as our new environmental action plan. In order to achieve the 2018 targets set for various environmental items including Green Indexes, all our Group employees will proactively conduct environmental activities.

For these environmental initiatives to bring about great innovations, we need to have active communication, where we put forth various ideas one after the other and receive frank opinions from all the stakeholders involved. Panasonic calls such relations “‘eco ideas’ Relations (eR),” and by means of activities such as the ‘eco ideas’ Forum held on October 6, 2010, it has been conducting a range of initiatives to communicate more with its stakeholders through various opportunities.

• Midterm Management Plan
• Annual Business Policy Fiscal 2012

Green Plan 2018 is Panasonic’ s environmental action plan that outlines initiatives for all Panasonic Group employees to carry out. Following our previous action plan, the Green Plan 2010, which was established in 2001 and completed in fiscal 2010, our new Green Plan 2018 provides a clear action plan to take our company forward from fiscal 2011 through fiscal 2019. Our action plan consists of a set of goals and targets including the four core items from our Green Indexes, as well as goals for water conservation, use of chemical substances, and other environmental challenges such as biodiversity. Panasonic employees are committed to the Green Plan 2018 and we will continue to work together with everyone in society to address shared global environmental issues.

Of total CO₂ emissions from our business activities, emissions from the actual use of our products by customers account for a large proportion. We will cut CO₂ emissions by setting targets to reduce the amount of CO₂ emitted from the use of our products in people’ s daily lives, in addition to endeavoring to reduce emissions from our production activities across the world. Specifically, we will deliver even more energy solutions by providing energy-creating/storing equipment and energy management systems, and also by fostering business related to eco-cars. We aim for CO₂ emissions from our business activities to reach a peak in 2018 and then decline by providing more advanced products and systems towards the global minimization of CO₂ emissions.

Since fiscal 2011 we have also been enhancing measures to deal with the depletion of resources. We are committed to decreasing the amount of resources used and increasing recycled resources as our basic policy, and are pursuing recycling-oriented manufacturing from the procurement of materials and through the design, manufacture, and transportation of products. As for the recycling of waste from factories, which we have been promoting by setting specific targets, we will further enhance activities outside Japan while continuing the activities we started in fiscal 2011 to further increase the percentage of recycled resources within the total resources used by our factories.

Water will increase its importance as a resource. In response, we will globally foster the recycling of water within our factories, in addition to continuing to reduce the use of water. We will also develop more products that will contribute to water saving and recycling.

As for the management of chemical substances, we have been implementing measures based on an initiative to target all countries, including those where the use of chemical substances is not regulated by law. For example, for the RoHS Directive enforced in Europe, we have met the criteria earlier than planned and on a global scale. Towards 2018 we will of course identify all the chemical substances used in our products and at our factories, assess their environmental impacts, and voluntarily reduce or discontinue the use of chemical substances with significant environmental impact.

Although we have been addressing biodiversity in our social contribution activities, we will begin implementing measures to conserve biodiversity in our business activities towards 2018, focusing on the following three fields: land use, procurement, and products.

With regard to our No. 1 eco-conscious products, we have been globally fostering development activities to increase the number of eco-conscious models. However, for CO₂ emissions reduction, it is essential that these products are actually used by customers. We will foster the development of No. 1 eco-conscious products using more strict criteria while promoting the sales of these products in every category. We aim to double the sales share of these products in our total sales by 2018, compared to the fiscal 2010 level.

These targets cannot be achieved by Panasonic alone. We will ask for the understanding of all our partner companies and build closer relations with them to accelerate our contributions to the environment. Moreover, we will foster the Panasonic ECO RELAY for Sustainable Earth campaign in which employees of the Panasonic Group will cooperate with people across the globe. We will foster collaboration with society at large in a range of aspects, including the development of human resources and proposals for green lifestyles.