We would now like to start Sony Corporation's FY 2020 Corporate Strategy Meeting. I will be acting as your moderator today. I am Kato from Corporate Communications. This meeting is being held for the media, analysts, and institutional investors whom we have informed in advance. The sound and presentation will be posted on our website. First of all, our CEO, Yoshida, will give an explanation.
Good afternoon, everyone. I am Kenichiro Yoshida. As I explained at the corporate strategy meeting of fiscal year 2018, which was also my first year as President, management with a long-term view is a lesson passed down to us from our founder, Akio Morita. Now that the new coronavirus has changed the world, I am reminded once again of its importance. When managing a company with a long-term view, it is essential to clarify the meanings of the company's social existence, that is, its purpose, and the direction management is taking the corporation. For Sony, the purpose is to fill the world with emotion through the power of creativity and technology. Our management direction is getting closer to people. Many of Sony's 110,000 employees are having to telework today. They are conducting business with a shared goal of filling the world with emotion and getting closer to people.
I have never felt so strongly as I do now the social significance of continuing to deliver emotionally impactful audio and video content to the world at a time when people around the world are refraining from going outside. Now, I would like to discuss these three points. People are at the core of Sony's business portfolio. Our content and direct-to-consumer businesses, which together with creators create emotionally impactful content and deliver them to users, seek to move people's hearts. Sony's branded hardware businesses provide equipment that is essential for creators to create emotionally impactful content and for users to enjoy them. Our CMOS image sensor business makes a key device for smartphones used by people around the world to share their emotions. These are businesses that connect people to people.
At this year's CES, I talked about our contributions to the future of mobility through technology such as CMOS sensors and our first-ever active sensing lidar solution for automotive use. I also introduced VISION-S, which embodies our efforts in this space. At last year's CEATEC, we exhibited a wide range of medical equipment. These businesses aim to contribute to the safety and health of people. Our financial services business, which has a 40-year history, places great value on providing assurance to people. These are businesses that support people. We view the three areas where we support people in terms of safety, health, and assurance as growth businesses for Sony over the long term. They are areas where we can leverage our technology. As you can see, Sony's business portfolio is diverse even while it is always centered on people.
This diversity contributes to the stability of the company. Going forward, we will continue to strengthen the management of the group to make that diversity even more of an advantage. In the past, we withdrew from some businesses like the PC business and the battery business. We will continue to review the composition of our portfolio as a regular practice of management. People will always remain at our core. In order to promote the evolution of each business and solidify our diverse business portfolio as an advantage, we announced two actions designed to strengthen group management. The first is the creation of the Sony Group Corporation on April 1st, 2021.
We will clearly separate and redefine the functions of the current Sony Corporation, which currently has a mixture of group headquarter functions and electronics business headquarters functions, and create a company that will focus on group headquarter functions. The mission of Sony Group Corporation will be to conduct the activities shown on this slide from the perspective of the entire group. When Sony Group Corporation launches, the Sony Corporation company name will be inherited by the electronics business, which is the original business of the Sony Group. The second action to strengthen group management is the consolidation of Sony Financial Holdings, of which we currently own 65%, into a wholly-owned subsidiary. Financial services, along with electronics and entertainment, is a core business of Sony, and it is a business which supports people, which we view as a long-term growth area.
Precisely because it is a core business, we have increased our ownership ratio of it several times in the last few years, strengthened its governance from the perspective of shareholders, and taken various actions recently, such as changing its dividend policy. In order to strengthen the management of this business and increase the corporate value of the entire Sony Group, we have decided to make it into a wholly-owned subsidiary. This is because we believe that rather than maintaining an independent source of capital in the form of a listed subsidiary, which brings with it certain restrictions, it would be better to prioritize swift and nimble decision-making and increase management optionality, so as to pursue strategies that are tailored to each business and synergies across the Sony Group.
Moreover, the financial services business has a stable business platform in joining this business, because it can contribute to the stability of managing the Sony Group. I would like to discuss the state and direction of each of our businesses. First is the Game and Network Services Segment. At a time when people are voluntarily not going outside, demand for digital entertainment, such as games, is increasing globally. In this environment, PlayStation users have increased significantly. As an example, subscribers to our PS Plus subscription service increased by 2.7 million over the course of the three months of the fourth quarter of the previous fiscal year. As of the end of March of this year, the total number of subscribers reached 41.5 million. It is important for us to maintain and expand this increased engagement going forward.
One way to do that will be for Sony to further revolutionize the game experience for users by launching the PlayStation 5, which is scheduled for the holiday season of this calendar year. In order to further enhance the sense of immersion in games, we expect to improve not just the resolution, but the speed of games. For example, through a custom-designed, high-speed SSD, we plan to realize game data processing speeds that are approximately 100 times faster than PS4. Game load times should be much shorter, and players should be able to move through immense game worlds in almost an instant. This should enable us to provide users game experiences that are unbroken in their immersion. In addition, to create games that provide players more of a sensory experience than ever before, we plan to revolutionize the controller.
For example, by installing haptic feedback, we aim to create the feeling of heaviness when a car passes over a muddy road. By installing adaptive triggers, we plan to create a sensation of tautness when a bow is pulled back. These realistic sensations should bring further excitement to games. Sound is also an important part of immersion. By installing a customized 3D audio processing unit in PS5, we have made it possible to deliver diverse and sophisticated 3D audio experiences. Players can experience sound that moves from in front to behind, above to below, and all around them. By combining speed, haptics, and sound, we can further improve on the wonderful experience available on PS4, making the PS5 a truly next-generation console by providing game experiences that were not possible before.
Games for the PS5 that deliver this new game experience are being made by both first and third-party developers. We plan to introduce a compelling lineup of titles soon. At PlayStation, we believe consoles provide users game experiences that are immersive, while cloud gaming provides users with game experiences that are seamless and can be enjoyed anytime and anywhere. We will provide users both types of experiences going forward. PlayStation Now is a cloud gaming service that Sony began earlier than any other company back in 2014. By changing the price and strengthening our catalog of games, including the addition of many AAA titles, we have expanded this service into one that has over 2.2 million paying subscribers as of the end of this April.
Using the same streaming technology, our remote play functionality enables users to play games on their PlayStations anytime and anywhere at no additional cost. Since the rollout of this functionality on iOS and Android, users have increased almost 2.5 times. Music is a business that is expected to grow steadily due to the strengthening of our music publishing business through the acquisition of EMI Music Publishing and the growth of the streaming market. Meanwhile, competition in the industry for artists and catalogs is becoming more intense. In the overseas music business, the Sony Music Group, which combines recorded music and music publishing, was established in August of last year. With a vision to become the most talent-friendly music company, the label and publishing teams are working together to support artists from all directions.
In the Japanese music business, which has created hits in diverse areas of IP, such as music, anime, and character merchandising, artist management is also an area that will be enhanced. In the summer of last year, we established The Orchard Japan to support the discovery and development of indie artists and the overseas distribution of domestic Japanese artists. The pictures segment. At a time when DTC services are being launched one after another and the demand for content has increased even more than before, Sony Pictures is investing in the development of owned IP and the strengthening of its creative capacity. It has been making films using Sony's Spider-Man Universe that have performed well in recent years. It plans to make movies and TV shows based on IP from PlayStation games in the future.
It has reactivated IPs it already owns. Sony Pictures Animation is continuing to make animated films despite the current difficult environment. We aim to continue to produce superb video entertainment in these diverse genres. At the same time, the impact the coronavirus is having on the video entertainment industry is extremely large. Along with the creative community and our supply chain partners, such as exhibitors, we plan to thoroughly assess how consumption of video content will change in the future and adapt to those changes accordingly. Now, I would like to talk about anime, which spans our game, music, and pictures segments and is an IP genre around which fans form an extremely strong community.
The global market for Japanese anime content has grown about 1.5 times over the past five years, and the main driver of this growth is sales outside of Japan, which currently accounts for nearly half of the market. Sony is a global entertainment company headquartered in Japan, and we want to contribute to delivering Japanese anime to fans all over the world through our proprietary anime DTC services such as SPE's Funimation. Anime and games have a high affinity in terms of the customer base, and we plan to further strengthen efforts such as the promotion of Funimation on the PlayStation Network. In terms of content production, Aniplex has created the "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba" anime, which has now become a hit that can be called a social phenomenon, and it is developing a mobile game and a PS4 game based on this IP.
As part of the overseas expansion of anime IP, we have formed a capital and business alliance, mainly in the anime and game fields with Bilibili, a company with whom we already collaborate to distribute Fate/Grand Order in China. Regarding digital entertainment in China, where growth is expected, we will strive to strengthen a wide range of relationships with local companies in anime, games, and music. The electronics products that Sony has introduced to the world since our founding are the key elements that have built the Sony brand. The EP&S segment will inherit the Sony Corporation company name and will work to increase its value. In the area of electronics, where we have focused on high-value-added products, we will continue to deliver products and services that deliver reality in real-time through sound, video, and communication technologies, connecting creators to users.
In addition to reality and real-time, we recognize the need is increasing for solutions that connect people to people and people to things remotely due to the coronavirus crisis. Here, Sony believes that it can expand into new areas such as acceleration of remote solutions for shooting, relaying, and editing technologies originally developed in the broadcasting business and can deliver live music remotely using the solutions that we developed. In the medical business, which supports people, we will strive to contribute to the health of people over the long term by leveraging the imaging, display, and mechatronics technologies that we have cultivated over many years. The coronavirus crisis has had a major impact on product demand and supply chain in this segment.
We will work to enhance our competitiveness in response to these changes in the environment. In the Imaging and Sensing Solutions business, we are reviewing our capital expenditure plans due to the recent deceleration of smartphone market, but there is no change to our goal of maintaining our global number one position in imaging and gaining the global number one position in sensing. The adoption of sensing solutions for mobile devices that connect people to people is expected to expand, including the adoption of ToF sensors for smartphones. In addition, we are working on automotive sensing solutions that support people and which are expected to grow over the long term. We believe that image sensors will be key devices in the AI era, so last week we announced the commercialization of the world's first Intelligent Vision Sensor with AI processing functionality.
Today, we jointly announced a new collaboration that will bring together Sony's image and sensing solutions technology with Microsoft Azure to provide value-added AI solutions for enterprise customers across industries. In this area, we plan to take advantage of a world-leading stacking technology to diversify the range of data that can be captured, from data that is viewed by human beings to data that is used by machines to learn and make decisions. That will enable the use of data across numerous applications. Further, in the AI space, we established Sony AI, a subsidiary comprised of a group of the world's top-level AI researchers and engineers. We plan to advance AI technology in fields that only Sony can, such as games and imaging and sensing, and in new areas. As I said at the beginning, financial services is a business that supports people whose hearts we aim to move.
It is a business that contributes to the economic assurance of individuals and families. It is also Sony's original D2C business in the service business space, and that utilizes the Sony brand. Going forward, the management structure of Sony Financial Holdings will be strengthened. After making the financial services business a wholly owned part of Sony Group of companies, we plan to take various actions, such as further increasing the value of life planners, who constitute the core value of the life insurance business, which is the center of the business. Moreover, we aim to create even more synergies through, among others, leveraging Sony's technologies as we have done before. Today, I have spoken about these points. As I mentioned at the beginning, Sony's social mission is to create and deliver emotion.
For people to be connected through emotion, it is necessary for people, society, and the global environment to be healthy. At Sony, we are taking various steps to address the environment, beginning with our contribution to the future of mobility, which will help reduce footprint on the environment in the future. In response to the current global issue of the new coronavirus, we launched a $100 million U.S. global relief fund to support the medical, education, and creative communities. As part of the support we provided through this fund, we are collaborating with M3 to contribute to the front lines of medical care. We are supporting the production of ventilators and providing face shields for medical sites. We are assisting children whose access to education is constrained by providing free of charge educational programming kits. We are providing support to artists and game developers who are facing difficulties.
Artists and creators who have close relationships to Sony are appealing to their fans on their own initiative to promote behavioral change and social solidarity. Sony will continue to contribute to people, society, and planet through its business operations as well as various social support activities. Thank you for your attention.