Financial Strategy

Basic Policy on Shareholder Returns

The IT market for enterprises is expected to grow more in demand as the need for DX (Digital Transformation) is advocated. Under such a growing market, IIJ Group is in the midst of growth, and aims to achieve continuous enhancement of its corporate value by expanding the scale of business while increasing revenue growth and operating profit margins. In recent years, IIJ has maintained an adjusted dividend payout ratio of approximately 30% as returns to shareholders, and dividend per share has been largely increasing in line with profit growth. IIJ plans to increase returns to shareholders along with profit growth while taking into consideration a certain level of retained earnings and strengthening its financial position in order to flexibly respond to business investments ahead of competitors and M&A opportunities that would accelerate its growth.

Dividend Per Share

(As of the end of March 2023）

Approach to Investment

Business Investment

IIJ Group believes that expansion of business scale is important to continuously demonstrate its competitiveness in a growing market, and therefore pays close attention to revenue growth rate as a management indicator. Profitability tends to improve along with revenue growth, and IIJ Group also considers operating income and operating margin to be important indicators, which are linked to ROE. Business investment and service development in new technological and other areas are continuously required, and these have been actively promoted. Business investments are evaluated through measures such as IRR with flexible assumptions depending on the nature of business, and decisions are made at the Board of Directors meetings and/or management meeting in consideration of resource allocation to existing core, growth, and new business areas as a portfolio. Their returns on investments are monitored by each business and service.

Capital Investment

IIJ Group's major capital investments consist of acquiring facilities for service operations, such as networks, Cloud and data centers, and customer facilities required for systems integration, and software development. In anticipation of market expansion, IIJ Group had increased its capital investment level prior to FY2017 and have continued to invest at that level since then. Although IIJ Group has been continuously expanding network infrastructure and actively developing services, in recent years its investment and depreciation costs have remained stable in balance. IIJ Group expects such a situation to continue for the foreseeable future.

M&A

Although organic growth has been a core driver of IIJ Group's business, in the past, IIJ Group has executed M&As and PMI (post-merger integration process) such as IIJ Global Solutions Inc. (acquired the business from AT&T in 2010), which provides WAN services, IIJ Protech Inc. (M&A in 2014), which acquires and supplies engineers, and PTC SYSTEM (S) PTE LTD (M&A in 2021), which is a leading local system integrator in Singapore. These companies have been demonstrating the effects of collaboration within IIJ Group. IIJ Group considers that securing resources is important to realize further growth in the future. Therefore, IIJ Group shall continue to pursue M&A opportunities.

Communication with Capital Markets

IIJ Group is in the middle of growth and recognizes that close communication with the capital markets is very important. Management members directly communicate with shareholders, institutional investors, and analysts through road shows, conferences, and individual meetings in Japan and overseas. In FY2021, IIJ held meetings with a total of 358 domestic and foreign investors. In FY2022, IIJ has been carrying out IR activities at a pace exceeding that number.

In order to disclose information on IIJ Group in an appropriate, timely, and fair manner, IIJ discloses important information such as annual securities reports, quarterly reports, financial results, presentation materials, convocation notice of general meeting of shareholders, and consolidated reports in Japanese and its English translation on the same day. Furthermore, IIJ Group recognizes the importance of addressing ESG issues through its business activities in order to achieve long-term sustainable growth of IIJ Group and society. IIJ Group has disclosed information based on the TCFD framework, expanded disclosure of its diversity policy and targets, and also been continuously communicating with ESG rating agencies.