News Release

Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. (President Mitsuyoshi Shibata, hereinafter Furukawa Electric) and UACJ Corporation (President Mitsuru Okada, hereinafter UACJ) formed a basic agreement to establish a company that will conduct sales, technical service, and development management of blank material for aluminum memory disks (hereinafter, blank material) used in hard disk drives (hereinafter HDDs).

There is a trend toward demand for HDDs increasing year by year, with the rapid growth of data centers to support cloud services, and people recording high-definition television programs and the like, and the quality required in memory disks for high density HDDs is increasing as well.

Currently, with respect to blank material, UACJ provides Furukawa Electric with aluminum material, and then Furukawa Electric processes into blank material and sells. Although the two companies are working cooperatively with respect to quality and technical support as well as developing materials, with increasing the level of quality calls for further strengthening cooperation and establishing a system to provide consistent quality and technical service from materials to processing.

Furukawa Electric and UACJ have formed a basic agreement to establish a new company, Furukawa UACJ Memory Disk, which will integrate sales and technical service functions with regard to blank material in order to respond to the needs of customers in a more accurate and timely fashion, and which will add the development management function.

The new company is expected to launch operations on April 1, 2015, and first year sales are expected to be about six billion yen.

Furukawa Electric (TSE; 5801, ISIN; JP3827200001) Group started business in 1884, when its copper-smelting facility and wire manufacturing factory was established. Since then Furukawa Electric has become pioneers in the latest technologies by addressing diverse technological issues. Furukawa Electric has released products in a number of areas, including telecommunications, electronics, automobiles, and construction, with the three types of materials it works with at their core, namely, optics, plastics, and metals. Many of these products have attained the top global market share, and all of its products have contributed to society in numerous business areas. Furukawa Electric reported consolidated revenues of JPY 931.8 billion (approximately USD 9.3B) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2014.