Welcome to Advantest Corporation's Sustainability Briefing. Thank you all for coming today. I am Yoshitake Kobayashi from the IR department of the Corporate Planning and Stakeholder Relations group. I'll be the moderator today. This is our first ever sustainability briefing. Every year, we strive to enhance our disclosure of non-financial information by issuing integrated report and sustainability report. However, our dialogue with our stakeholders suggests that we need more opportunities to explain our sustainability-related themes, which are of great interest in the capital markets, so that stakeholders can understand our initiatives more organically and multi-dimensionally. Today, three of our executives will explain two elements of Advantest corporate value improvement, our structural management reinforce initiatives, and our human capital betterment initiatives. This is today's agenda. First, President Yoshida will explain Advantest significance and our vision, followed by Co-CSO Mihashi on our value creation process.
Finally, our CHO, Keith Hardwick, will talk about our human capital betterment initiatives. The presentation should take about 60 minutes. Afterwards, we'll take questions. The briefing should wrap up about 5:30 P.M. With that, I'd like to welcome President Yoshida.
Good afternoon. I'm Yoshiaki Yoshida, President and Group CEO at Advantest. I'd like to talk about the purpose of our existence of our company, and how we are contributing as a company to the common good. Advantest delivers safety, security, and comfort to people worldwide through semiconductor test. Semiconductors are now incorporated into a wide variety of products and infrastructure. They enrich people's lives, enhance convenience, and help to solve social issues. These semiconductors are rapidly evolving to deliver even higher performance in their many roles. As semiconductors come to be used in more and more diverse applications, defective semiconductors no longer just cause inconvenience.
Defects in the semiconductors used in automobiles, medical equipment, and data servers can lead to serious problems and even loss of life. Therefore, it is essential for semiconductor manufacturers to carefully check the quality of their devices during the verification process to ensure they operate as designed and inspect them thoroughly during mass production. Advantest products are used for these processes. That's why we believe that our products play a key role in everyone's safe, secure, and comfortable lifestyles. As explained in the previous slide, quality and reliability assurance are essential processes in semiconductor manufacturing. Advantest products are currently used by almost all major semiconductor manufacturers to support the design and manufacturing quality of their devices. In our R&D, we always look several steps ahead of where our customers, semiconductor manufacturers, are with their product development. In this way, we support the constant evolution of semiconductor technology.
As shown here, since our founding in 1954, measurement has been our core technological competence. Until the 1970s, our main business had been an electronic measurement instruments business. Since the 1980s, we have pivoted and focused on semiconductor test equipment, which is our flagship business today. Along with the evolution of semiconductors, it is becoming increasingly important to support higher processing speeds and to improve throughput by efficiently measuring multiple semiconductors simultaneously. Therefore, our efforts to improve the accuracy of each individual measurement technology we incorporate into our products and the systems we offer as our solutions for customer issues. Solutions as systems which combine multiple measurement technologies contribute to the evolution of the semiconductor industry as a whole.
Since our founding, we have fearlessly developed the leading edge technologies the semiconductor industry has needed in each era, inventing new things at each step in keeping with the founder's engineering spirit. This attitude has been handed down from generation to generation and is central to our company's DNA. This slide shows our sales trend since our founding. The structure of our business is such that our performance fluctuates depending on customer CapEx trends. A couple times in the past, our performance has fallen off steeply following global economic shocks. Such as the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the 2008 financial crisis. Nevertheless, in recent years, against the backdrop of the progress of the digital and data society, we have been able to steadily increase sales. Our major turning point for us was our merger with Verigy in 2011.
Strengthening our SoC tester business has directly contributed to the stabilization of our business performance. The integration of the Verigy team is also a major factor that has increased sales in recent years, as it brought many overseas employees with different cultures and backgrounds into the Advantest Group, leading us to overcome many difficulties and fuse our workforce into our team. I'm confident that we will continue to grow over the medium to long term through our efforts to strengthen the management foundation that supports our global operations, promotes our corporate culture, as well as through the ongoing efforts of our many employees. In the tester market, it is essential to have technology and support capabilities that build customer trust, as well as a strong financial base that enables continuous R&D.
There are many players in the tester market in Japan, the U.S., and emerging economies, but companies that lack one or the other of these foundational strengths have been forced out of the market in the past and will likely meet the same fate in the future. Market share can therefore be used as an index of the overall sustainability of tester suppliers. We have consistently pursued a strategy to capture a wide range of customers from top semiconductor players to new market entrants, and have made efforts to increase our market share year by year. As a result, we have increased our market share to an estimated 55%, maintaining the number 1 position in the industry in calendar year 2022.
We will continue to work to maintain and increase our market share through R&D based on our long-term roadmap, which takes semiconductor technology trends as its reference points, and by expanding and refining the tailored solutions we offer for diverse customers and applications. As I explained earlier, we are in the business of delivering safety, security, and comfort worldwide through semiconductor test, underpinned by our measurement technologies. To maintain and improve our position in the global semiconductor tester market while keeping our focus on safety, security, and comfort, we have defined our purpose and mission as enabling leading-edge technologies. We will continue to improve ourselves as a company and contribute to the common good through the development of leading-edge technologies based on trends in advanced semiconductor technology that are embodied in the products and services we provide to all our customers around the world.
Moving on, I'd like to explain the aims of our medium to long-term management strategy. We consistently aim to sustainably improve our corporate value. As shown in the image on this slide, we aim to sustainably expand our future cash flow by expanding the cube of our corporate value through our business activities along the three axes of shareholder value, stakeholder value, and ESG value. As shown here, as business environment is constantly changing, the geopolitical risk picture is raising uncertainty, and recently, we have seen rapid inflation. There is an increasing demand for companies to implement ESG measures, such as transitioning to carbon neutrality, ensuring the soundness of their entire supply chain, and strengthening corporate governance. In terms of technology, we anticipate an increase in demand for semiconductors and active technological evolution as the digital transformation progresses, and technological solutions are sought for issues such as energy conservation.
The semiconductor industry itself is likely to evolve to become more complex. Even amidst all this fluidity, my belief is that we must build a stronger management foundation with the goal of growing sustainably through these challenges so that we can one day celebrate our 100th anniversary. In 2018, we formulated our Grand Design as a mid- to long-term management policy and set out our ideal future and strategies to get us there. In 2021, when we formulated our second midterm management plan, we added enhanced ES initiatives as a fifth strategy based on our recognition of how the business environment is changing, as mentioned earlier, for ourselves to become more sustainable and to enhance our contribution to enable more sustainable society. In the slides that follow, I will introduce specific examples of the environment and governance initiatives that power our ESG strategy.
Against the backdrop of the accelerating push for net zero, our customers, major semiconductor manufacturers, are further emphasizing the importance of reducing CO2 emissions throughout the entire semiconductor supply chain. Reducing the power consumption of our products and reducing CO2 emissions in our business activities contributes to our customers' Scope 3 emissions. We have set a renewable energy sourcing target of a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions from business activities by 2030 compared to FY 2018. As of FY 2021, we already achieved 100% renewable energy sourcing at our locations in Europe and the Americas, as well as at the Gunma factory, our domestic production base. Furthermore, our continuous R&D focus to deliver new products that enable reducing CO2 emissions per test and improving the performance of testers in line with the evolution of semiconductor technology is an important factor when customers choose Advantest.
It is directly linked to our competitive advantage. For more than 20 years, we have been working on the development of Green Products with low environmental impact based on voluntary standards such as energy and resource saving, recycling design, and elimination of hazardous substances in new product development. In addition, we obtained SBTi certification in 2021, and have set long-term technology goals for 2030, incorporating CO2 reduction targets based on SBT into our technology and development roadmap. These efforts contribute to reducing CO2 emissions throughout the semiconductor supply chain while accelerating society-wide sustainability and enhancing our sustainability as a company. Next, I would like to touch on our governance. Each month, the board of directors meets for 3-5 hours, an adequate amount of time for open-ended discussions.
Separately from these regular meetings, the board of directors also gathers at off-site meetings to devote additional discussion to medium to long-term issues. In various cases, outside directors have contributed multifaceted and specialist knowledge at board meetings that has had an impact on our corporate management. One example is the formulation of a medium to long-term management policy looking 10 years into the future. The transition to a CXO structure was another example of an outcome based on the board of directors discussions. At the off-site meeting held in FY 2020, an outside director expressed the opinion that we should consider a CXO system from the perspective of strengthening our global management system. After discussions among executives, the Nomination and Compensation Committee, and the board of directors, we did indeed transition to a CXO structure.
I am proud of the effectiveness that our board of directors demonstrates in both its monitoring and advisory functions. I would like to explain our global execution system. To ensure our growth in the global fluid semiconductor market, we needed to speed up decision-making and execution throughout the group. We implemented a unit system to increase the flexibility of our operations. As shown in the diagram on the left, we have established seven regional units that cover the entire world between them, and we appoint local talent as leaders of each regional unit. As a general rule, we aim to secure a sense of unity in group management and enhance local business execution capabilities by having these leaders concurrently serve as executive officers of the group.
As a result, nearly half our executive officers are now non-Japanese nationals. In terms of business operations, as shown in the diagram on the right, we have adopted a matrix system of business units and functional units. By allocating responsibility and authority to the leader of each unit, we aim to facilitate prompt decision-making and business execution through direct cooperation between units. Running a matrix style organization is never easy. The key is how efficiently each unit can communicate, and for that reason, it is important to have a fundamental corporate culture that is shared by all the units. In FY 2021, we transitioned to a CXO system. The aim was to appropriately delegate authority to senior executive officers, expedite management decisions, and utilize the power of CXOs, including overseas executives who are qualified in their respective fields of expertise.
In addition, in January 2023, we shifted to a system with 3 representative directors. This is part of our succession plan and one of our measures to strengthen our management structure, which aims to achieve overall optimization through appointment of global human capital. Looking ahead to FY 2023 and FY 2024, when our next medium-term management plan begins, we will build a strong management team to achieve even greater strides forward. As shown in this table, our ESG Action Plan 2021-2023 sets KPIs for our priority themes of environment, society, and governance. Each CXO takes responsibility for, and leads goal achievement activities. In this way, we aim to become a sustainable company by working to strengthen and promote our ESG management and building a strong management foundation. Next, Mr. Mihashi will explain Advantest value creation.
I'm Yasuo Mihashi, Advantest Co-CSO. I'll speak about our value creation process and the source of our value. This figure shows our value creation process as disclosed in our 2022 integrated annual report. As shown on the right side of the slide, we define the output of the value creation process as solving customer issues. We create value for all stakeholders by providing solutions that enable leading-edge technologies and spark innovation in semiconductors through the resolution of customer issues. In order to create value by solving customer problems through our business activities, as shown in the blue circle in the center of the slide, the five strategies set forth in our Grand Design are centered as the main drivers of our value creation. We are striving to improve our corporate value by intensively investing in these forms of capital, which are illustrated as inputs on the left side of the slide.
In this value creation process, we have established The Advantest Way, our corporate philosophy, as the basis for maximizing our employees' capabilities and achieving the goals of our Grand Design. This slide is a bird's-eye view of our value chain, showing how we contribute to the well-being of individuals and the common good. Moving from right to left, semiconductors are indispensable to the creation of a safe, secure, and comfortable world. In recent years, the use of semiconductors to help solve environmental and social issues everywhere with technology has been accelerating. That makes it essential to improve the performance and energy efficiency of semiconductors while increasing their supply. However, as a result, the difficulty of designing and manufacturing semiconductors is increasing year by year, and semiconductor manufacturers are facing various issues.
Advantest, on the far left of the picture, solves these issues for semiconductor manufacturers and provides test solutions to speed up the innovation cycle. In the order of the arrows, the high-performance semiconductors that chip makers produce can be incorporated into everything. The value created by our company is returned to each stakeholder directly and indirectly, and as a result, we contribute to the creation of a better world. This slide shows precisely what kind of challenges our semiconductor manufacturer customers are facing at present, which we need to meet customers' expectations in the value creation process. In order to meet environmental and social needs, our customers are working on the development of a mass production technology for semiconductors with higher performance and reliability. In particular, improvements are being made in 4 areas: performance, power consumption, chip size, and cost.
As a result, the 6 items above are the major challenges in semiconductor test technology. Without going into detailed explanations today, Advantest is expected to propose test solutions that can solve or minimize these issues. As I've shown, in the test industry, providing high-quality solutions that address customer issues leads to the creation of a better world, and at the same time secures our own sustainable competitive advantage, which is directly linked to our corporate sustainability. Based on this industry structure, we have set a medium to long-term vision of adding customer value in an evolving semiconductor value chain as a part of our Grand Design. In line with this vision, in order to expand our business domains, we are promoting the organic expansion of our core business while also actively engaging in M&A and alliances.
We believe that by developing broader and deeper solutions, we will be able to provide even greater value to our customers in terms of solving their issues. One example of this is our expansion into SLT, shown on the right side of the slide. We will continue to build the breadth and depth of our solutions by expanding our business domains with the goal of resolving customer issues more comprehensively. I've explained our growth strategy, and now I would like to touch on the key elements that support that growth. Our value creation stems from our R&D capital and customer-facing capital, both of which are underpinned by human capital, manufacturing capital, ecological capital, and financial capital, all supported by The Advantest Way. These types of capital are interconnected and lead to our company's value creation.
In order to solve the problems of customers, direct source of most of our value, the two most important types of capital are R&D capital and customer-facing capital, which are shown in pink. We regard these as key drivers of our earning power. This slide explains how Advantest earning power has been formed. On the left is a visual visualization of a part of our business model. Close communication with customers is our starting point. We feedback the cutting-edge test trends we learn about from them to our next generation solution development, which further increases our presence in the industry and strengthens our relationship with customers. This is the essence of our business model, which we have refined over the past several decades in line with our guiding principle of Quest for the Essence.
In order to further grow the value we provide to customers in the future, we will maintain and expand the synergistic cycle shown in the diagram on the left by further improving our ability to develop better foresight into customers' technological trends, with the goal of contributing to their time to market, time to quality, and time to volume. In order to contribute to customers' time to market, time to quality, and time to volume, we need to upgrade each type of capital we possess. Of particular importance is upgrading our human capital from a long-term perspective. For example, in order to bring products with superior performance to market in a timely manner, accurate and precise analog measurement technology is essential. To stay at the leading edge of the industry, we need engineers with at least 10 years of experience in the field.
To provide our global customers with comprehensive and accurate consultations on complex tests and supply chains, we need human capital with abundant career experience and know-how. We have worked to develop human capital, such as R&D, system engineers, application engineers, sales and marketing, and field support, and this in turn has refined our core competencies. As a result, we have achieved a track record as the industry's number one technological leader with comprehensive solution capabilities, including peripheral equipment and global support capabilities. We have also built the industry's best customer base and the largest installed base. However, as Mr. Yoshida said, in the age of VUCA, efforts to better our human capital will be even more important for our company in the future. Keith Hardwick, our Chief Human Capital Officer, will now explain our human capital betterment initiatives in light of those circumstances.
Good afternoon. I'm Keith Hardwick, the Chief Human Capital Officer of Advantest. I'm based in San Jose, California, the heart of the Silicon Valley. Today, I'm excited to be here to share with all of you how Advantest is working to better our human capital around the globe. Of course, I'm also looking forward to our Q&A session after today's presentation. As Mr. Mihashi just explained, the importance of human capital, personally, I believe our human capital is Advantest's most valuable asset and the driving force behind our company's value creation. Our employees drive innovation and efficiency improvements, leading to our success and leadership role in the marketplace we serve. Now, let me dive into some more details to explain how we are developing and reinforcing and enhancing Advantest human capital structure globally. Here you can see a little bit of Advantest history.
Advantest was founded in Japan in 1954 and has grown into a global company over time. Advantest has evolved from a test and measurement company into our primary market of automated test equipment. Over time, our business environment has shifted as well as our customer base has shifted from IDMs to globally disintegrated fabless customers. Along with this shift, our revenue has moved, and we're over now 90% of our revenue comes from overseas. With this shift, Advantest adjusted, and we've been committed to utilizing the talented human capital we have globally to enhance our success and growth. This was highlighted with the integration of Verigy into the Advantest Group in 2011. At this time, our workforce composition changed dramatically, with the ratio of non-Japanese nationals rising to almost half.
Today, it is even more, with the majority of our employees being overseas versus domestic Japan. With this change, we took this as an opportunity to move from regionally based human capital systems to globally unified human capital processes, where it made sense, while still recognizing that we need to have some processes remain regional. Some of the globally unified personnel systems we changed were global. We instituted global job levels. We standardized salary ranges, taking into account regional differences. We unified the performance appraisal forms, process, and timing. Finally, we implemented a global bonus program that unified the regional bonus systems to a global system that focused on consolidated results of the company. All of these efforts were taken to globally unify Advantest and strengthen our management foundation as we're all working towards the same goal.
This was a lot of change. This was just the start. Our next step was to build a shared corporate culture that we would enhance or transform into a global company. We knew this transformation would take time. We believe we are still on the process of this journey today. The Advantest Way was introduced in 2019. Advantest has always had an action guiding principle, which is represented by Quest for the Essence, which was the starting point of our code of conduct. Verigy, originally a Hewlett-Packard spinoff, also had a corporate culture that took pride in the HP Way. We developed a global team to come together while respecting each other. They worked together to build a corporate culture to realize our combined potential.
After two years of brainstorming and fruitful discussion amongst the team members of managers and employees that we felt demonstrated our global values that we wanted to proliferate throughout the company. This team came up with the acronym INTEGRITY. INTEGRITY represents the Advantest core values. As you can see on this slide, innovation, number one, trust, empowerment, global, respect, inclusion and diversity, teamwork, and yes are the core values. They are summed up by the acronym INTEGRITY. INTEGRITY is the foundation of our corporate culture that encourages colleagues with different cultures, language, and values to perform at their best as a team. It's starting to become a shared language that unites colleagues around the world, transcending regional and organizational boundaries. Regarding INTEGRITY, I'll introduce some specific initiatives we've implemented to inoculate this worldwide to Advantest employee base in the second half of my presentation.
Before that, I want to explain how our HR, our human capital strategies support our management strategies. On this slide, you can see an outline of our company's human resource strategies, which are linked to our management strategies. From the left side of this slide to the right, you can see how our management vision and execution of those strategies leads to our HR strategies, which as human capital officer, I've been implementing since 2022. I have been developing HR strategies to aid a successful execution of our management strategy. Our personal strategy holds the individual strengths and organizational strengths are the foundations of human capital management. We aim to increase engagement, strengthen comprehensive power with our human capital to create a sustainable value. The individual strength and organizational strength are like two wheels on a bicycle.
In the following slides, I'll explain our main measures to enhance these efforts to nurture a corporate culture that keeps these two wheels pumped and rolling smoothly. On the next slide, you can see about individual strengths and development abilities. In terms of individual strength, we put even more effort into developing our employees' abilities. We have established an Advantest Development Framework, a skill development framework that stipulates the skills required for each job level inside of Advantest, and a variety of training courses that will help an employee achieve those goals to move to the next job level. As example of skill development programs, we've globally implemented an e-learning platform to allow employees around the world to take online trainings in order to gain skills that they can get to their next job level. In addition, we've also introduced a Global Talent Management Program.
This program is used for global succession candidates for key positions inside of Advantest. The folks in this program receive training that will enable them to take on key positions in Advantest at some point in time in the future. As disclosed in our integrated annual report, we invested JPY 400 million in education and training in 2021. This represents a 75% increase from the previous year, we plan to continue to strengthen this investment in 2022 and 2023 so that we can enable our employees to enhance their skills and further develop. Next, I would like to talk about how we retain diverse human capital and maximize their participation. As a company that does business with customers all around the world, we believe diversity is essential for our sustainable growth.
As explained on previous slides, with the integration of Verigy in 2011 and subsequent acquisitions in the SLT business unit in the US, we've greatly expanded our business domains along the semiconductor supply chain as set forth in our Grand Design, which was released several years ago. As a result of this effort to expand in the semiconductor supply chain, our workforce is now composed of over 57.9% of our employees being non-Japanese nationals. This was as of fiscal year 2021 and has even grown in 2022. Regarding gender, women are 20.8% of all of our employees, and 9.6% of our managerial staff are females at this moment. This is partly because we have few female engineers, but we're not satisfied with this result.
In fact, we're putting focus on hiring female employees and further increasing the percentage of female managers inside the company. In light of this situation from 2022, we will begin to strengthen and revise our personal system to connect with our individual strengths with our organizational strength. We will consider what kind of personal system we should implement to achieve our medium to long-term vision for Advantest. We will develop a foundation that allows diverse human capital to feel comfortable and play an active role during long-term careers inside of Advantest. Next, I would like to address retention. In 2002, we introduced stock options as a stock compensation program for executives in Japan and overseas. We're proud of the fact that we were one of the earliest Japanese companies to include overseas employees in this type of program.
Since then, stock compensation system has undergone several changes to make it function better as a retention system. In conjunction with the formulation of our second midterm plan in 2021, we have built a framework that allows employees to hold our shares globally. Currently, the competition to acquire human resources is intensifying. This intensity is even stronger overseas. In order to secure world-class engineers, we have expanded the scope of our rewards offering, and we've introduced restricted stock units, which will need to be held for 5 years before vesting, and then at which time sale or transfer is possible. We will continue to consider the scope and scale of our retention system as we go forward. Regarding employee retention, our turnover rate increased significantly in fiscal year 2021.
Some of this is due to the characteristics of our system-level test business unit in the United States, which was acquired in fiscal year 2020. There have been higher turnover rates than we've experienced in the past. Some of this might be expected with this group's acquisition, we are not happy with these results. We will try to enhance retention in addition to having appropriate salaries, promotion of a comfortable, rewarding workplace through INTEGRITY to improve our current turnover rates. Next, I'd like to move on and explain measures to improve engagement, which is the basis for our organizational strength. In order to objectively grasp the engagement level of our global employees, we hired Gallup to conduct an engagement survey.
Based on an initial score of 3.48 in 2018, we recognized we had particularly low scores on recognition, praise, and actualization of progress. We've implemented various actions and measures to boost these aspects of our engagement, employee engagement. On our second score in 2021, our employee engagement score increased to 3.64. This is an improvement of 0.16 from our first survey. This doesn't seem like much improvement, but we understand from Gallup it isn't common. It is a good improvement going from the first score to the second score. Our 2021 results still fell short of our goals, and the average scores are still below other Gallup customers. With this in mind, our efforts to continually improve engagement continue. We will introduce specific measures to improve engagement.
Hiring and retaining excellent people is critical to our success and our goal of becoming a 100-year-old company. We have embarked on a journey of a corporate culture transformation under the banner of INTEGRITY. The destination of this journey is each employee should embody INTEGRITY in their daily work life. First, from 2019, we provided INTEGRITY workshops to all employees to instill a shared understanding of our newly initiated core values. In fiscal year 21, we expanded this effort with the introduction of Leading with INTEGRITY. Leading with INTEGRITY was training class, was given to all managers globally to instill a leadership model required of them now and in the future. We also established a buddy system to help employees form buddy relationships across organizations, borders, promoting cooperation, and helping employees to advise and encourage each other on their individual growth journeys.
In fiscal year 2022, we tried to address the lack of recognition that our employees said they were experiencing. To address this, we introduced INTEGRITY Awards. INTEGRITY Awards was an action to recognize behavior in line with INTEGRITY, which allows peers to recognize peers or coworkers by recommending them for an INTEGRITY Award. By recognizing employees who practice our core values, we instill a culture of mutual appreciation and recognition for our staff. We believe that we can then create a culture in which employees feel valued, proud, and empowered to do good for Advantest. In addition, in order to further promote INTEGRITY, we have launched a Culture Council, which is led by President Yoshida and several senior executive officers. The Culture Council recommended employees representing each business function and regional unit in Advantest to act as an INTEGRITY ambassador.
The ambassadors are charged with the task of planning and developing activities to further our cultural transformation in the upcoming years. Going forward, we will continue to reinforce the comprehensive power of our human capital by tuning the wheels of individual strength and organizational strength inside of Advantest. Thank you for your attention. I look forward to answering your questions, which you may have shortly. Thank you.