On the analysis of changes in profit, could you give us the full-year outlook for items besides fixed costs?

The breakdown of a year-on-year decline of 1.1 billion yen in operating profit is as follows: an increase of 2 billion yen in sales (compared with an increase of 4 to 5 billion yen projected at the beginning of the year); a rise of 1 billion yen in cost reduction (unchanged from the initial projection); a drop of 3 to 3.5 billion yen in fixed cost (compared with an initial forecast of minus 4 to 5 billion yen); and 1 billion yen exchange loss (no loss/gain was initially expected).

You have kept sales and profit outlook unchanged for the second half of the fiscal year from a year ago although the market environment is getting worse. I understand this is because of the effect of the rollout of new products, which was mentioned in the page 17-18, but I would like to confirm that again.

We revised down our full-year earnings forecast to reflect the worse-than-expected macro environment for IT Agriculture. While concerns remain for IT Agriculture in the second half of the fiscal year, IT Construction is performing solidly and i-Construction in the Japanese market is growing. The outlook figures reflect those factors.

Regarding the establishment of a joint venture with Bentley Systems, what kind of business model do you have in mind? Is it correct to think that it is not simply to make it easier to connect Bentley’s CAD and Topcon systems?

It’s not just that. We will offer consulting service as well as solutions to the issue where designing department and construction department do not understand each other. For instance, Keyence is a good example of providing solutions with a bird’s eye view to improve productivity at the factory site.

Regarding the number of annual OCT sales, I understand about 3,000 units were sold in the last fiscal year. As for this fiscal year, is it correct to assume that the sales would increase by 20 to 30%?

I think you can assume that.

You have talked about large orders of OCT placed by a US optical chain store, but is it correct to understand that this would contribute to the sales in the second half of the year? Can I also assume that there are more than 10,000 stores in the US, which could be identified as potential markets?

You are correct to say the large orders are not included in the sales for the first half and will be reflected on the second-half earnings and afterwards. As for future prospects, we do not expect all the stores to deploy our products, but if we assume 10% of them would decide to do so, that would be big number of stores. Given the example of Specsavers where almost all 380 stores in Australia deployed Maestro, I believe our strategy has been right and proven.

Do you think software will be included in large-lot business deals?

We believe so. The US software company, which continues to make upfront investments, makes software which has a function to aggregate data. The product like this should serve a key role in negotiating with big chain stores.

Retinal camera NW400 was deployed by China’s Baidu. Is the service for NW400 only available in poor areas? Do you expect NW400 sales to expand further going forward?

The service at the moment is limited to poor areas. In the future, we expect not only sales of fundus camera NW400 but also OCT sales to grow.

Despite the impact of the downward revision of 5 yen to the euro in assumed exchange rate, you maintained your full-year outlook for Eye Care business. Is it correct to say this is because the large-lot orders for the Screening business would make contribution in the latter half of the fiscal year?

That is correct. But it is not yet clear whether we can continue to win large-lot orders going forward.