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$4.14—Stale · unknown old
Suguru Miyake : Thank you very much for joining us today. We would like to begin the financial results presentation for the first quarter of the fiscal year ending March, 2027. Today, we are broadcasting this presentation with simultaneous interpretation to audience of the entire world. I believe that there are some people who are listening to this presentation early in the morning or at midnight. Thank you very much for joining this session despite time difference. Please present our summary for the session. Nihon M&A Center Holdings has a purpose. It's to bring best-in-class M&A ever closer. We have been running our business with this purpose. Many investors, I believe, are already aware that in this first quarter, this has been a very important quarter for us. It's in the sense that in FY 2022, we had to announce our incident, inappropriate accounting incident. It's been four years after that, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. For these four years, we implemented improvement measures, and we have recovered. In the fiscal year that ended in March 2026, we had our record sales and ordinary profit. We achieved record high in both of them. A full-fledged recovery was made, we believe. Finally, starting from the current fiscal year, we are founding our company once again, and we are starting Vision 300 Next Genesis. The first quarter that we are announcing our result today is the very first quarter under this new Vision 300. That's why the first quarter has been a very important quarter for us. We are announcing and explaining the results of that very important first quarter for us. Starting with the overall summary, I believe that the results this time was very satisfactory for us. Three reasons for that. The first reason, we had very solid growth in sales and profit. The second reason is the other pillar, which is the fund business. We recorded enough and solid gains from the fund business. The third one is the most important one. This is related to leading indicators. Leading indicators that shows the prospect for Q2-Q4. We had very strong leading indicators. These are the three factors that have led to the satisfactory results in Q1. Starting with sales, JPY 9.1 billion, up 0.9% year-over-year. 188 transactions were closed. This count was down by 11.3%. Ordinary profit was JPY 2.252 billion, down by 11.1% year-over-year. Pre-tax profit was JPY 3.156 billion, up by 24.6% year-over-year. However, we sold an investment target from AtoG Capital, which is our fund business, and that was JPY 780 million, almost JPY 800 million. This gain on sale of investment was recorded as extraordinary gain. We had to handle this as extraordinary gain due to accounting principles. As a business, this is almost equal to recording additional sales. Therefore, if we could have recorded this as part of our total sales, then the actual sales, JPY 9.1 billion, could have been JPY 9.891 billion, up by 9.7%. Ordinary profit was JPY 3,390,000,000, up by 20%. Pre-tax profit would have been JPY 3,156,000,000, up by 24.6%. We would have able to grow more strongly in both sales and profit if we could account this as part of our sales, et cetera. One factor that led to this is that from April, J-Capital has been our intermediate holding company, and there's a contribution from this fund sector, more specifically from J-Capital. This has been the AtoG Capital that makes investment mainly in overseas projects, and that generated a profit of about JPY 800 million. I believe that the fund business made quite a big contribution this time that captures people's attention. The third factor, once again, is leading indicators that were solid this time. Starting with new sell-side mandates, that was JPY 347 million, up by 20.1% compared to the same time last year. This, as the first quarter was the best in our history, and of which mid-cap mandates were 76. The 76 mid-cap mandates acquired was up by 31% year-on-year. Keeping M&A sales per deal, I believe, is quite possible at solid level. Also we have transactions under negotiation, and that stock is at record-high level. As of the end of June, such stock or the negotiations or the transactions under negotiation were 17% up compared to the same month last year. 17% increase. In the first quarter, we had interim fee received. Interim fee received in Q1 was 17% higher compared to the same time last year. Transactions under negotiations are the transactions that are experienced in negotiations that are in pipeline. These are the transactions that are going to be closed and will be impacting our sales and profit. We will have the second quarter up to September and the third quarter up to December. We believe that the solid number of transactions under negotiations are going to lead to solid results in Q2 and Q3. New sell-side mandates that I mentioned at the beginning of the session. For the third quarter results till December and the fourth quarter results till March, I believe that these two quarters are going to benefit significantly from the new sell-side mandates. We have had really good leading indicators, and that's the summary. In the previous fiscal year, we had the record-highest sales and profit. I believe that putting ourselves in the good business cycle in the previous fiscal year didn't drag us in the first quarter this time. We believe that we made good preparation for achieving our target this fiscal year because we have enough pipelines and enough mandates. We're going to use them fully so we can leave good results in the second and the third quarter, and we're going to reach a peak in progress acceleration. This is how we plan to get us back to the customary cycle of performance achievement. Now we'll move on to balance sheet and income statement, and I will hand over to Mr. Naraki for the explanation.
Takamaro Naraki : Hello, this is Naraki. I'm going to first touch on income statement, more specifically, sales. As was mentioned by Mr. Miyake, we have all the figures listed on this page. As you can see, increase in M&A sales per transaction and decrease in number of transactions closed are the two major points. In the second row, you can see the number of transactions closed, and I have to talk about this. There was a postponement of the closure timing. Therefore, the number of transactions under negotiation at the end of June was at record high level. According to our internal document, transactions under negotiation that are big to a certain extent grew by 17% compared to the same time last year. In the first quarter, we received interim fee, that was JPY 1,358,000,000 compared to JPY 112 million recorded last year. There was an increase of 17%, so we have that many active mandates this time. You can find the same detail in our Tanshin report. Next page, please. On to expense and profit, starting with personnel cost. Personnel cost as part of cost of sales. This is the personnel fee for M&A consultants and front office staff. That was JPY 2.2 billion, up by 6.5% year-on-year. In the second box, there is a different type of personnel cost. This includes support people. That includes sales staff, that was down by 3% at JPY 1,051,000,000. As you can see at the top about referral fees and outsourcing expenses, compared to the same time last year, this was down by 16.1%. Ratio of direct mandates out of total transactions closed increased. Therefore, referral fee ratio out of sales went down by 2.2 points. From 13%-10.8%. There was a decline of 2.2 points of referral fee ratio. As you can see under the section of SG&A expenses, there was IT-related expense of JPY 314 million. This was up by 22.5%. Also, we spent advertising expense of JPY 259 million, which was up by 62.5% year-on-year. You may feel that this is quite a big increase year-on-year. Compared to the budget, these are actually on pace with our budget. Also, you can see ordinary profit of JPY 2,252,000,000. As we explained, we have the AtoG Capital-related contribution of JPY 787 million included in extraordinary gain of JPY 903 million. That is included in pre-tax profit. This is from our fund business, which is considered to be our main business. That is how we could have interpreted this. We had to focus on formalities, and this was considered to be the gain on sales of an investment from the company that we fully own. So we have to treat this as extraordinary gain. About P&L summary, this is going to be a repetition of what I have explained already, so I am going to skip this page. Finally, on balance sheet, we have been keeping healthy balance sheet. In the top row, we have asset data as of the end of the first quarter, JPY 54,442,000,000 total assets we had, net assets was JPY 47,732,000,000. The ratio of net assets was 87.7%. That indicates that we are maintaining a healthy balance sheet. Thank you for the explanation. We will move on to the topic about which we receive a lot of questions from investors, this is about leading indicators. These are important to understand or estimate our future result. As we have explained before, along the flow of a deal process, we are going to take you through our leading indicators. Starting with the number of new sell-side mandates, that was JPY 347 million, up by 20.1%, of which mid-cap mandates were JPY 76 million, up by 31% year-on-year. New buy-side mandates. The count was JPY 351 million, up by 4.8%. Of sell-side mandates, there were mandates in central areas, more urban areas, and the central area ratio was 61%. I believe this is a favorable trend for us. Even after we acquire mandates, if we cannot do enough pre-due diligence for those mandates, we cannot do good matching. Our company puts focus on solid pre-due diligence in what we call a preparatory phase. We have to do preparation before matching. The process of preparation used to take 90 days previously, but we shortened that to we have been trying to shorten that to 60 days. This has been a major project for us. As a result, our preparatory phase is less than 60 days at 56 days. Lead time is now shorter, which means that we can handle more transactions, more mandates now. The number of transactions closed and other financial performance will improve with the shortened lead time. The next point is on the number of transactions closed and the number of mandates acquired. At the bottom, we have the number of new sell-side mandates. Please pay attention to this number. In the first quarter, from March 2024, 280, 327, and then 289. This time, this first quarter, we acquired 347 new sell-side mandates. This 347 was the record high as the first quarter results. Toward the second, third, and the fourth quarter, I believe that we made good preparation. There's another important leading indicator, which is the number of employees. M&A consultants. We had 626 consultants at the end of the previous fiscal year, and the most recent number is 635. There was an increase. There are people who already joined our company after the number of people who accepted our offer, and those people are 55 in count. Going forward, we're going to accelerate our recruiting efforts. Please pay attention to corporate staff. From 201-236, there was an increase in corporate staff. In the past few years, we reduced corporate staff. We had a project of improving direct and indirect divisions. Despite such project, we had an increase in corporate staff count, and I have to explain this. This is because we used to do operation management that was done by M&A support department previously, and this team is now escalated to an operation management department, and this is now included in the corporate segment. We have more than 20 people that do the work. That led to the meaningful increase in corporate staff. To explain what this work is about, for the past few years, we started to take more responsibility about our result to what we do, outcome of generating best-in-class M&A. That has been the focus of our management, focus of our target of accountability. It's because Lucian, MJG, and other similar inappropriate buyer issues have been uncovered. Fraudulent buyer issues have been uncovered in the past few years. Also due to risky scheme, there were some M&As that wrote off, and we saw many of such transactions. We accepted the facts, and we decided to take more responsibility about the outcome of what we do to realize best-in-class M&A. What we decided to do is to do enough examination at the time of accepting mandates. After that, there is negotiation process. In that negotiation process, we've decided to do more confirmation of whether we have done enough due diligence and whether we have taken enough processes and enough steps. We also started to examine more about the scheme, et cetera. We also have been checking more thoroughly about whether seller owner's guarantee is released, et cetera. These work are done by the people of the operations management, and these people are going to be part of the headquarters going forward.
Suguru Miyake : Next, let us move into our midterm management plan. This fiscal year's first half and second half, when you look at the sales balance, it's 45% against 55%. First half, we want to overachieve this in terms of performance. Fortunately, pipeline, we have many deals that are currently in discussion, so we will continue to properly manage our business. Last fiscal year, the midterm management plan up to FY 2027, we were able to achieve JPY 19 billion ordinary profit against the original target of JPY 17 billion in FY 2025. With that momentum, in FY 2026, we aim to deliver upside results in a very solid manner. Vision 300, Next GENESIS to achieve ordinary profit of JPY 30 billion in FY 2032. In order to achieve that, we will continue to accelerate our efforts. What exactly is Next GENESIS? I would like to explain this. Our company, from this fiscal year, we have started our second founding. Our second founding means two things. One, it is about succession, passing on things to the next generation. The larger meaning and significance, our company has reached its 35th anniversary in this year. We are celebrating our 35th anniversary. Compared against 35 years ago, or even compared against 5 years ago, 10 years ago, the world has greatly changed. M&As have transformed from a B2B job. It's now transferring into a B2C-type job. M&A is not being that special. We are now moving into an age of AI. We are trying to properly handle this and create a new business model. This is Vision 300, Next GENESIS, and our second founding. In order to achieve this, the entire company needs to unite together. In order to do that, we have started a trust-type stock compensation plan. Shareholders, investors, and management, and employees. We all get on the same ship. We all make efforts towards the same purpose. That is what we want to achieve. As a symbol of that, we will also relocate our headquarters. We are planning to relocate our headquarters. This current headquarters is split up across 4 different floors. It is difficult to have real physical communication with each other. We are now planning to relocate to a building where a single floor is very wide and the consultant team, the sales team, will be consolidated into 1 single floor, and we will maximize real communication. That is how we will do our succession, but also create innovation at the same time, so we can achieve that. We'll become the symbol to achieve the true purpose of our second founding. The background is our mission framework that has been redesigned. Vision, starting with regional revitalization, driving the renewal of Japan, and ultimately become the world's number one integrated M&A company. In order to achieve that, we have core values. Be a professional. That is our core value. Our sales organization has greatly transformed, too. In the past, we have been mainly focusing on small SMEs, but it's not just SMEs. In listed companies, too, there's a lot of business reorganization, carve-outs, attempts to focus on where you can win. In order to handle that situation, IB coverage division, strategy division, we have created those divisions so we can respond to the needs of listed companies, too. Next, let us move on to shareholder equity, shareholder breakdown. Naraki will explain.
Takamaro Naraki : I will explain the pages on shareholder equity and shareholder breakdown. Just like in the previous year, we plan to continue the dividend payment of JPY 29. That includes JPY 4 of extraordinary or special dividend. As you see at the bottom of this page, during the period of midterm plan, up to March 2028, we are going to have more than 60% dividend payout ratio. This has been upheld as our basic policy of shareholder returns. If you look at the right-hand side of the top, we have the forecast for March 2027, the current fiscal year, total JPY 29 and special dividend is JPY 4. Ordinary dividend is JPY 25 accordingly. At the profit level of our current guidance, if we do a calculation based on that current guidance level, the dividend payout ratio becomes 60% based on the JPY 25. We're going to avoid cutting dividends. For March 2027, we have added special dividend of JPY 4, so total is JPY 29, which will be the same as the year before, March 2026, in terms of the absolute amount of dividend. As a result, as you'll see at the top of this page, for FY 2026, the expected dividend payout ratio will be 71.3%, including the JPY 4 special dividend. Next page. This is about our ROE. It has been above 20%. In the current fiscal year, March 2027, this is expected to be 24.4%. Under the current midterm plan period, on about March 2028, the next fiscal year, we are planning to keep at least 24% ROE, between 24%-25%. The page after. This page shows shareholder structure and the transition of our market cap. That's it. Thank you.
Suguru Miyake : Now we will move on to related activities. I'm going to share with you some important topics. Tokyo Pro Market. The number of IPO support for Tokyo Pro Market has reached 60. From Tokyo Pro Market to growth and standard, such general market, there have been companies that step up to those general markets, that lets to- It's not just the Tokyo Pro Market, Sapporo, Fukuoka, they have started a similar market. Regarding this, we have also got certification as an advisor. What is notable is PMI. PMI consulting, the SME Agency, the FSA, they want to drive successful M&As. They want PMIs to be more solid. That is what they have instructed to us. But out of various boutiques, we are the only company that really is dedicated to PMI. There's a lot of need. Track record of providing PMI 55, 66, and now it's at 132, but we want to turn it into 200, 250, 300. That is what we aspire for. We want to do even more advanced PMIs. We need to do joint research with academia to do this. We now have launched joint research with Kwansei Gakuin University. When you look at our overseas activities this year, finally, we have achieved our 10th anniversary. Very happy to achieve this. We are smoothly growing our business. This will be a larger portion of our business into the future. We will continue to grow this business. We announced this the other day. With Generational Group in the U.S., we also signed a strategic alliance with this company, five countries in ASEAN and Korea and North America. We will spread this sort of a network. Over to the right, you see we were able to do an M&A with a U.K. company. That is another very notable topic. When you look into our fund business, this is something that we want to make a pillar that stands along with M&A, and we have established J-Capital as the intermediate holding company. Underneath J-Capital, we have the AtoG search funds. We can do comprehensive fund businesses under J-Capital in this way. When you look into some other topics, AI is a big topic nowadays. I believe this is very critically important. In order to utilize AI, it's about how much you can accumulate unique data. You really need data-driven business management. In order to do that, in terms of data collection, that's something that we have been focusing on in a very full manner. Sellers, potential buyers, the interviews, business interviews. With agreement from customers, we have been recording those conversations, and we are now turning that into a database. We also have real marketing. Marketing roadshows. Seminars are something that we are very good at. We are doing seminars throughout the entire country. In terms of regional marketing, we are also doing seminars. This photo is a radio broadcast in Ibaraki Prefecture. I was doing a radio broadcast, a program that features me. In terms of direct marketing, we have a regional focus and industry specialization. An industry strategy. Regional industry strategy. With that matrix sort of structure, we will also continue to grow direct marketing in a very solid way. This year is our 35th anniversary. It's a great opportunity, so we want to utilize this for our sales, so we can do many promotional activities. That is what we aspire to do. Through those efforts, the Guinness World Records for five consecutive years have recognized us the best-selling mergers and acquisitions company. That is how we have been recognized. When you go into industry trends, there's just one item I would like to explain. It's the latest information.
Naoki Takeuchi : There is a qualification system that starts from 2027. This is going to be implemented as a law and regulation. Not just that, supporting agencies are now registered to SME Agency, and that registration system is also going to be legalized. So a more strict registration system will be in place going forward. So we have examination system and registration system that is going to be codified in laws and regulations, and I believe that this is going to put us in a more favorable or advantageous position. That is the end of our presentation, and we will start taking your questions with the three of us. We will welcome your questions. President Miyake, thank you very much for the presentation. Now we will move on to Q&A. We have a chat function at the bottom of the screen. Please input your questions from there. Please understand that we may not be able to answer all of your questions due to time constraints. We will start taking your questions. Before we start receiving your questions, we are going to share with you some of the questions that we receive often from investors, together with our answers. First question. As a way of continuing to improve the qualities of the new sell-side mandates, the ratio of mandates acquired through our partners is growing year-on-year. But I believe that this means, at the same time, that the ratio of direct mandates, where you do not have to pay referral fee, is declining. Please talk about the advantages of growing the mandates that you acquire through your partners that could be lower in gross margin. Right. This is a great question. This is also a question about a very important theme for us. We have been focusing on acquiring mandates from our network channels. One of the reasons for that is that the direct market is not stable. 10 years ago, in our industry of M&A intermediaries, there were only 30-40 players in the market. But currently, there are 450 to about 500 of such players. There was a significant increase in the number of players, and 85% of the current players were established in the recent three years or so. Those kind of new companies do not have their network. So they have to focus on direct marketing. They have to send a lot of direct mails. They have to make calls to acquire new mandates. The outcome of their activities is that our potential sellers and buyers receive calls and approaches almost every day. So our potential customers are fed up with such approach. Therefore, even when we focus on such direct sales and marketing, the response rate has gone down by a single-digit or even double-digit percent. So we believe that at this point in time, it is better for us to focus on acquiring mandates that we gain from network partners. Another reason is because of such situation, mandates in the direct market has lower rate of eventual closing as transactions. In our network, we have accounting offices and banks. These companies have been looking at the financial results of the potential targets for many years, and our network partners have the long history of tens of years of working with the president. Our partners have not only quantitative information, but also qualitative information, such as the character of the president and strength and weakness of the potential sellers and buyers. As a result, acquiring mandates through partners give us better successful closure rate. If we acquire mandates from direct market, as you said, we don't have to pay referral fee. That's true. However, the ratio of closing the direct mandates is lower. As a result, when we think about the productivity is better from network channel. However, we are not contented with that current situation. We have been thinking about how we can acquire more higher quality mandates, and we've been thinking about how to improve the customer response rate. That has been addressed by our focus on some regions and having teams focused on some regions and teams focused on some industries. These teams have been enjoying really good response rate because they have the strong trust from customers, and they've been doing consulting sales activities. Customers' response rate is very good, and also they can talk about really specialized technical topics, and these teams are well-penetrated in the target regions. Closure rate is very good with these departments. We are going to continue to implement these two strategies as a metrics.
Suguru Miyake : Next question. You did mention that the closing of multiple deals was delayed to the next quarter or beyond. Does this mean that there were more delays compared to the usual years? Compared against the prior year first quarter, how much did these delays increase in this first quarter? Could you explain that using monetary value? Thank you for this question. These number of delays and how they go up and down, I don't think it's that much of an increase compared to the prior fiscal year. The deal delays, there were 25 last year, about JPY 290 million or so. This year, 16 and JPY 140 million. That does not mean there are a lot of those delayed deals in the pipeline. Last third quarter, fourth quarter, we did solid matching, and that has grown our pipeline compared to last year. Pipeline has increased 17%. We have more transactions under negotiation, and that's because we were able to do solid matching. These delays themselves have not increased that significantly. Next question. At the end of June, the company had 635 M&A consultants. How many of them were new graduates? Do you have many turnover, many people who left our company, although they're young? Do you have the continued net decline in the number of consultants, excluding new graduates? When can we expect to have net increase in the number of people planned to join the company after July? When can we start to have a net increase? Thank you. Recruiting and retention has been the most important item for us to improve, and we've been sincerely addressing this since last year. This has been addressed by Takeuchi-san as a central figure, and he's going to share with us the actual reality as well. This is Takeuchi. To talk about new graduates. New graduates are included in 635 and 46 new graduates this time. Last year we had 55 people or 56 people, new graduates, and last year as well, new graduates were included as well. Overall, we believe that the new graduates and other numbers have been growing solidly. In terms of the net increase, actually we had a net increase as of the end of April, but full year, we plan to have at least 10% net increase. I actually feel that it's possible based on the actual activities of recruiting and retention. I myself have been joining 70%-80% of the final interview. From 50 recruiting agents, I get direct contacts. I directly talk with them to shorten lead time. That's how our company has been focusing on improving recruiting. As a president, I shouldn't just focus on that.
Naoki Takeuchi : We record interviews, and we get lessons from that and apply the learnings to the future interviews for thereafter and thereafter as well. We have such system in place. To talk about turnovers, we also feel that our measures to reduce people who leave our company has been effective so far. We have 48 general managers in sales headquarters and 64 group leaders, total of 112. To new employees, role-playing has been provided, and role-playing has been done together with group leaders and above. This is a system that we call stamp rally system. We have been making sure that enough close communication has been made with upper-level people for new people who join our company. Also, at least 60 points are needed from the role-playing out of 100 and then one stamp can be provided, and 15 stamp is required at least. When new people join our company, their passion is really high. They're the most excited when they join our company. It's important to set target when they are most excited about our work. That's what we have been trying to do. We have been providing enough opportunity to make communications with general managers and group leaders, and we believe that these kind of measures have been effective in improving penetration rate. We have members who joined our company in April and July, and they have been enjoying the work. We see their smiles. Net increase of at least 10% this fiscal year, I believe is possible. Well possible.
Suguru Miyake : Thank you for that response. Next question. In order to achieve Vision 300, in addition to the domestic M&A intermediary business, you've also stated that you would like to expand your business areas. When you look at the JPY 30 billion target, is that something that is only achievable through only the domestic M&A business? Please tell us the outlook of the fund business and the overseas business up to 2032. Thank you for this question. JPY 30 billion. That is kind of a wordplay to 25, March 2033, the month of three and JPY 30 billion. We have a lot of 3s lined up there. If we had a JPY 3,000 share price, we'd have five 3s in a row. It would feel very fortunate, that's also something that the market is to determine. March 2033, JPY 30 billion, we knock down four 3s. I personally believe this is a very conservative number, we can achieve this with just our domestic business. When we increase headcount and when we increase the productivity per head, have more people, and achieve more through per head. In order to achieve more per head, training, reducing turnover, and utilizing AI to provide support, those 3s can improve what we achieve per head. When that grows and when the headcount grows, we can then achieve the JPY 30 billion. We can then add on the fund business and the overseas businesses as ONS. That is the ideal state that we want to achieve. When you look at the overseas business, we have achieved our 10th anniversary, and from this fiscal year, we are now working on a growth strategy. My vision, 10% share overall of our business, that is something that I have been wishing for. As the first step, we first like to aim for 10%. In order to do that, it's not just ASEAN, Americas, Europe. Moving into there is also going to be very important. The fund business, it's about how much funds we can accumulate. There's a lot of uncertainty. We need an even further mid to long-term viewpoint for this business. The J-FUN, the Growth Strategy Fund, and the AtoG Overseas Fund, and J-Search, the Search Fund, all three of those have very solid signs of growth. Among those, the Search Fund, I believe it has a very high probability of success, and when it grows, I believe it also has the potential to expand. It has a lot of potential when it grows, too. We are working to build this with regional banks. In regional areas, there is a lack of people that is more prominent than the lack of funds. We work with the Hokuriku region, in the Search Fund. We work with Higo Bank or Kagoshima Bank, Miyazaki Bank. We work for the Minami Kyushu Search Fund, we want to spread this out to the 47 prefectures throughout Japan. When we do that, we have a lot of breadth, width when you do that, and achieving success here can turn into large potential. That is what I am thinking.
Takamaro Naraki : Next question. In this past year, M&A sales per deal has been at high level. Can we understand that it has stabilized at the level of JPY 45 million? This is a good question. I don't think that JPY 45 million is the level that this M&A sales per deal has stabilized at because we have microcap mandates, microcap transactions that are handled by Batonz platform, covering the kind of businesses that could be mom-and-pop family businesses. The real such efforts, we've been trying to improve our M&A sales per deal, but the number of transactions closed, I believe, is not growing enough yet. We have to add more transactions we close. When we close more transactions, I assume that M&A sales per deal will go down a bit. We are struggling to grow in the number of transactions closed. That's the reason why I believe that the M&A sales per deal is relatively at high level. Based on my gut feelings, we have to add more transaction closures. The appropriate M&A sales per deal, I believe, is above JPY 40 million. If possible, we don't want to go down JPY 40 million as average M&A sales per deal. Our focus should be on growing transactions we close.
Suguru Miyake : Next question. Qualification systems and stronger compliance. Through that, we can expect a more healthy industry. Does that have any potential impact to your sales activities or to your deal-closing processes? Especially when you look into the qualification examinations for individuals, this is likely to become a national certification, but could people need to spend so much time for that to prepare, and could that restrict those sales activities? Thank you for the question. This also is a very important question. Conclusion-wise, no impact. I would rather say this would push us into a better direction. The qualification system, I back this. I am fully agreeing with this. In our company, we are already starting to study for this. Internally, we also have started some examinations inside the company. We are already trying to improve the level of our people in advance, and we are building in a habit to study, to prepare for exams, and we are trying to make that take root inside our company. Once this qualification comes in, we will then fully focus on responding to that sort of a system. Everyone will also improve their skills up to that point in time. I believe there will be no major impact. Takeuchi-san, you take care of the front lines. Do you have any thoughts about this?
Naoki Takeuchi : I completely agree. I believe this is a tailwind for us. When you look into the M&A industry, customers. Well, the M&A industry has been democratized, so there's more knowledge in people because people are learning more and more about M&A deals. The knowledge required to us consultants, we need to study 2 times, 3 times more to really keep up with that trend of increasing knowledge. We have accumulated data, learning training functions from the past that is going to be an advantage for us. As we heard in the question, when you spend more time to learn and study, the time you spend on sales activities could be lost. I think that's where your concern comes from. However, that is why AI, Gen AI needs to be completely introduced so we can improve our productivity. For example, I'm sidetracking a little bit, let's say a single salesperson, when they visit a customer, they do a lot of research. They spend maybe 30 minutes, one hour, one and a half hours to do the research they need to visit that customer nowadays. We have developed AI. We can build publicly available information into AI. There's this castle close to the customer history. All of that information of course goes in, the latent information, what are the deals that happened close to that area? What are the trends of the deals in that particular area? All of that potential kind of information also gets captured. A single salesperson can then look at that single-page report or a two-page report and then have a very smart ice break process with the customer. Very productive. They can reduce 30 minutes, one hour of time, and then they can spend that time to improve their knowledge and study. What I'm feeling right now is when you look at large companies, they can use the power of size. Companies that have accumulated data, those can win even more at this time. We need to continue to improve our knowledge with the industry, and we are also doing some early investments into AI. Doing those AI investments to improve our efficiency is also going to be very important. Thank you so much.
Suguru Miyake : Next question. Please share with us the balance of negotiation open mandates at the end of June. Please talk to us about the background of changing the definition of the number of new negotiation starts, also please disclose the same count according to the old definition. I will hand over to Naraki-san for this question.
Takamaro Naraki : At the end of June, the balance of negotiation open mandates was 480 pairs. The same time last year was 409. This was an increase of 17%. Earlier there was a question about an increase or decrease in the number of delayed mandates or the delayed transactions. In the case of the delay in our company, the delays are often due to missing some information in documents also, or not being able to receive payments by the deadline, et cetera. This time on our IR document, we simply wrote that there was a delay in the timing of recognizing our sales, et cetera. These are not really the project that we were not able to close because of not having good documents, et cetera. It is rather because of the real delay in the process. One indicator is the leading indicator. After the start of matching, sell buy-side negotiation or advisory starts, et cetera. As a result of all those processes, there was 17% increase in the negotiation open balance. On 10-Q we disclosed about the interim fee we received in the first quarter, and that was JPY 1,358,000,000 compared to JPY 1,162,000,000 last year, same time last year. This interim fee received was up by 17%. This indicates that we have a lot of transactions that are under negotiation. To talk about the next question, on page 10 in the center, we have some detailed information. This is related to the second part of this question. Starting from this year, we have changed the definition of new negotiation starts to talk about this. The question is about the background, and this is on the third row. For the same sell-side mandates, there are cases where there are negotiation with multiple parties, and in those cases, we started to count them as a single transaction or single mandate. These are the cases for which multiple buyers have raised their hand. However, eventually, when the deal is closed, there is only one buyer, a one-to-one kind of deal. That has been the method of counting. Compared to that, we believe that it is more accurate when we count them as a single transaction. That is why we have started to change the definition to communicate a more accurate situation to investors. To talk about the final part of this question. This question is what the number was according to the former definition of, for example, what the count was when we had three buy-side mandates for a single sell-side mandate. About this question, I have to apologize that I do not have the answer that is readily available immediately. Since we have reached our planned time to end this session, the next question is going to be the final one for us.
Suguru Miyake : So after the first quarter results, please share your determination and enthusiasm towards achieving your guidance for the first half of the year." Thank you. The first quarter results, financials. The very beginning, as I mentioned, the leading indicators are in a very good situation. That is what I believe. First, the number of back orders, 17% higher compared to the previous year. The interim compensation, we have a basic agreement that is also increased by 17%. There are various transactions, negotiations, and process where we are finding deals. We have many of those mandates. For September, we are going to solidly close all of those so we can then generate good numbers. In our company, we are also properly managing the process itself, so we are very confident on making progress in this way. In terms of new mandates, those are also coming in, and those will go in to influence the December and March results in a very positive manner. We want to maintain the current momentum. The first half, the second quarter, we can add up very solid results. We are very confident. Please continue to cheer us. Thank you so much for your participation, and thank you for the many questions. Institutional investors, we also want to meet you in one-on-one meetings. Please try to reach out to us. We will try to respond to your expectations, and we will solidly manage our business so we can meet your expectations. Please continue to cheer our business. Thank you so much for your participation today.