2024 President's Message

For 135 years since our establishment, Nippon Life has been committed to balancing the sustainability of society with the sustainability of our business. In other words, we value society as the foundation for our corporate activities and resolve social issues in order to contribute to the sustainable growth of local communities and Japan as a whole, which in turn leads to the growth and development of the Nippon Life Group. Our goal is to further enhance sustainability management. We are acutely aware of this goal.

In this context, we spent the past fiscal year reviewing our sustainability priority issues as part of our efforts to enhance sustainability management. One of the reasons for this was that we felt that the focus of our sustainability management had become blurred, as we had previously defined our priority issues broadly in 18 areas based on factors such as the SDGs. In reviewing our priority issues, our primary concern was to ensure that they were understandable and relatable to the executives and employees responsible for addressing them. We reorganized the issues into three contribution areas: "People" as individuals, "Community" made up of those people, and "Environment" in which such communities gather. In other words, our vision expands from people, to communities, to the globe.

Going forward, the Nippon Life Group will continue to make contributions in the areas of "People," "Community" and "Environment" from both its position as a provider of products and services in life insurance and other areas, and as an institutional investor. In doing so, we aim to create "a society in which everyone can live their lives with peace of mind." In addition, to ensure that we go beyond simply stating our goal for society, we have recently established outcome targets linked to our sustainability priority issues. By setting quantifiable outcome targets and linking them closely to each unit's KPIs and initiatives, we will be able to verify our current progress and move forward while receiving feedback from various stakeholders.

"Healthy life expectancy" is a key theme for people and the community. In order to enable people to live longer and healthier lives, we believe it is important to create systems that enable people, for example, to receive proper treatment at an early stage in the mild stage of a disease. Not only do we develop and provide products and services designed to help people prepare for and mitigate risks, but our approximately 50,000 sales representatives at 1,500 sales offices nationwide offer life insurance and encourage people to undergo cancer and adult disease screenings, providing reassurance to customers in their local communities. In addition to these initiatives, we have set the themes of health and productivity management support for companies and health promotion for our employees, making four in total, thereby promoting contributions aimed at extending healthy life expectancy.

In fiscal 2023, we also launched new healthcare services. Starting with our diabetes prevention program, we plan to expand our lineup of services beyond diabetes to contribute to the extension of healthy life expectancy by promoting our healthcare business.

As our next challenge, we feel the need to further expand our lineup of contributions to local communities. In advancing these efforts, we will not only collaborate with local governments, but also seek ways to resolve issues rooted in local communities by promoting the formation of private-sector partnerships with local businesses, NPOs and others.

At Nippon Life, we regard the global environment as a vital and irreplaceable foundation for people to live with reassurance. For this reason, we strive to preserve the global environment from our perspective as both a business and an institutional investor. In addition, we measure the greenhouse gas emissions from our own portfolio and are working to reduce them in order to achieve a decarbonized society.

Some investors seem to have the notion that if they do not own shares in companies with high greenhouse gas emissions, or if they sell off those shares, their portfolios will no longer be problematic. However, simply selling off shares means that someone else buys them, and the overall situation remains the same. I do not believe that the strategy of cleaning up only your own portfolio, like cleaning up only your own lawn, is the right thing to do for the global environment.

Nippon Life has built-up capital, including retained earnings, and our risk-resilient portfolio allows us to hold stocks and other securities in a wide range of industries and diverse companies for long periods of time. Therefore, instead of dwelling on the short term, we can encourage companies that emit large amounts of greenhouse gases to make efforts to reduce them through persistent engagement. In other words, we continue to hold shares from a long-term perspective while urging industries and companies to make a change. This, I believe, is our mission in the insurance industry and our role as an institutional investor.

Together with our new Mid-Term Management Plan, we have set forth a new long-term corporate vision of aiming to be "a corporate group offering various types of reassurance across diverse areas centering around life insurance, spanning out to asset management, healthcare, long-term care, childcare and others as a provider of 'multidimensional peace of mind.'" In creating this vision, we were strongly mindful of achieving "expansion of the value provided to society" and "Nippon Life Group's growth." Our new Mid-Term Management Plan is positioned as an important effort, the first step toward realizing "multidimensional peace of mind."

Our long-term corporate vision is to be a provider of "multidimensional peace of mind" that offers reassurance in a broad range of living situations, with a focus on life insurance. Through Group-wide efforts, we will contribute to the realization of "a society in which everyone can live their lives with peace of mind." To do this, I encourage each employee to truly understand this concept, think about how their work relates and contributes to it, and proactively take action.

Ever since I became president, I have been constantly repeating, "People are power, people are everything," with the intent of maximizing the value of tackling work as a team. Although the phrase itself has become well embedded in the Company, I feel that we are only halfway to embodying its essence in our day-to-day work. I aim to further instill "people are power, people are everything" into our corporate culture to enhance our team, organizational and corporate strengths.

In order for the lives of individual customers and Japanese society as a whole to continue to improve in the future, we must not only strive to maintain the status quo, but also continue to challenge ourselves to pave the way for a future we can smile about. And to support this challenge, we must first and foremost establish the foundation that enables people to live with peace of mind. This, I believe, will lay the groundwork for each and every one of us to meet the challenges facing the future of Japanese society.

The Nippon Life Group will continue to support the foundation that enables our customers to live with peace of mind, while contributing to the development of vibrant local communities and the preservation of a beautiful global environment. By providing the foundation for living life with peace of mind, we will contribute to the creation of a future society better able to proactively take on challenges.