CEO New Year's Message

Happy New Year.

AI's evolution accelerated in 2025, and this led to the rise of AI agents and their rapid adoption across society. In 2026, AI agents will become closely integrated into our lives, from business to daily life, and usher in a new era where we use AI routinely in all of our activities. I am convinced that a "society that coexists with AI" is on the verge of taking shape in earnest.

In these changing times, SoftBank Corp. has been working to build an environment where all employees can effectively utilize AI in their daily work activities. In February 2025, we announced "Crystal intelligence," an initiative to transform Japan's corporate management with AI. Working toward its rollout in 2026, we have been actively promoting AI adoption internally and laying the necessary foundations. Rather than just introducing AI tools, we have been focusing on enhancing employee skills with training, establishing work processes that leverage AI and fostering a corporate culture that encourages its proactive use. As a result, our employees created more than 2.5 million AI agents company-wide. These efforts have steadily increased internal AI adoption and made the use of AI the norm in our daily operations.

Across our businesses, we are making steady progress toward achieving the targets of our three-year Medium-term Management Plan, which ends with this current fiscal year. Our goal of achieving ¥1 trillion in operating income is now within sight. In the Consumer segment, the 'SoftBank' and 'Y!mobile' brands both continue to perform steadily, maintaining a revenue and profit growth trend. At the same time, the Enterprise segment, which has been sustaining double-digit growth, is driving initiatives that support the AI transformation (AX) of enterprises. I believe services such as our AI-powered contact center solution "X-Ghost"—provided by our subsidiary Gen-AX—will serve as key drivers of future growth.

Building on these business foundations, we are making steady progress on our rollout of Next-generation Social Infrastructure to enable a society that coexists with AI. Our AI computing platform, which serves as a backbone for data processing, was ranked No. 1 in Japan in a benchmark that measures AI computing performance. Leveraging this infrastructure, we started offering commercial services based on the homegrown large language model (LLM) "Sarashina mini" we have been developing. In addition, other initiatives—such as the provision of sovereign cloud services in collaboration with Oracle, the development of next-generation memory technologies to enhance AI data center performance and the promotion of mobile networks designed for the AI era with AI-RAN—are taking shape as infrastructure and technologies that will support a society that coexists with AI. This year, our AI data centers in Tomakomai City in Hokkaido Prefecture and Sakai City in Osaka Prefecture will begin operations sequentially. This will enable us to take a major step forward in providing compute capability, a component of Next-generation Social Infrastructure.

In addition to AI agents, we will see the start of fully-fledged "physical AI" operations in 2026. With the convergence of AI and robotics, physical AI will advance to a stage where AI autonomously makes decisions and takes action in physical spaces, thereby increasing its importance as Next-generation Social Infrastructure. We already started collaborating with Yaskawa Electric Corporation in this field, and we will continue to expand our physical AI initiatives going forward.

We are now formulating our next Medium-term Management Plan. In our next phase, we will finalize our Next-generation Social Infrastructure products and services. In an era where AI supports society and dramatically transforms industries and our daily lives, our business growth will be focused on supporting this foundation for AI. In 2026, we will continue to embrace challenges, striving to become the company that is the greatest contributor to society in the next generation.

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