Now we'd like to start the sustainability briefing of ITOCHU Corporation, Enhancing Corporate Value through the Evolution of Workstyle Reforms. Today, we would explain the background, tracks of evolution, and key concepts of our workstyle reforms, which clearly defines the human resource strategy as one of our management strategies from both an executive and supervisory standpoint. In the corporate value calculation formula, we will mainly focus on how to lower the cost of capital. Let me now introduce the participants from ITOCHU. First, Mr. Fumihiko Kobayashi, member of the board, executive vice president and CAO. Next, Ms. Atsuko Muraki, outside director. Next, Ms. Yoshiko Matoba, general manager of human resources and general affairs division. Also, as observers, we have Mr. Tsuyoshi Hachimura, member of the board, executive vice president and CFO. Also, we have Yasuyuki Tabe, the general manager, sustainability management division. So first, Mr.
Kobayashi, CAO, who became the general manager of the general affairs division in April 2010 and has stayed close to the front line and led the human resources and general affairs policies. He will talk about the evolution of workstyle reforms of ITOCHU. Ms. Muraki, outside director, who was the official at the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in charge of the labor policies and empowerment of women, will talk about evaluations from the macro perspective of the country. Now I'd like to hand the microphone to Mr. Kobayashi. This is Kobayashi, CAO of ITOCHU. When we talk about the workstyle reforms, we usually discuss this in the context of improvement of the labor environment and improving the motivation for the employees. Today, we would like to add the perspective of sustainability and talk about the workstyle reforms that we have conducted at ITOCHU.
This is today's agenda. First, what we thought with the original programs will be explained, and how did we switch to the workstyle reforms and what did we do. I would introduce the major ones. As a result, what were the quantitative achievements? Now we are moving on to the next stage and the relationship between the workstyle reforms and sustainability. That will be the end of my part and I will ask Ms. Muraki to talk about number six, evaluations from the macro perspective of the country. Let me start with what we thought with the original programs. In 1999, we went through major revisions of HR programs. We aimed to be an employee-friendly company. We went through various challenges, but we tended to pursue only the ideal. There were two major reasons. Many numerical targets, which were quite different from the reality, were set.
There were mismatches from the front line. The second reason was that the program expanded and there was a negative effect, and there were employees who abused their rights. We needed the reforms. In 2010, Mr. Okafuji became the president, and first, in-house childcare facility was set up because it was very much needed, and we started with the workstyle reforms. The beginning of the workstyle reform was 2010. At that time, there were two major assumptions at ITOCHU, which continue to be the same. First assumption is that we have a remarkably low number of employees compared with the general trading companies associated with former Zaibatsu industrial groups. You can see the blue line at the bottom. Number of employees is about 70% of other trading companies. We needed to maintain these smaller and capable employees.
Also, many of our customers were very close to the consumers. Our employees also needed to be close to their customers. Based on those two assumptions, those are the five aims of the workstyle reforms. First, since we are smaller in terms of the number of employees, every employee is better positioned to realize their full potential than at any other general trading companies. Secondly, in addition to being employee-friendly, we set the vision of creating a challenging but rewarding company and to provide returns to all the stakeholders, including employees, as we achieve results. We set the quantitative KPIs for the labor productivity, dividing the consolidated net profit by number of employees. Finally, we would implement reforms based on the spirit of Sampo Yoshi. Next is the concepts supporting the workstyle reforms.
Since we are a smaller team, to achieve good results, we needed to be efficient. We also need to enhance the employee motivation and develop the capability of each employee. The most important is the health of all the employees. As a result of those factors, we can generate the synergy to push up the labor productivity. This slide shows the history of changes of the workstyle reforms. Due to the short time of time, I would only mention the ones which are encircled in red, starting with the Morning- Focused Working System. This started with a strong initiative of the top management to eliminate the overtime at night and instead to work the following morning at early hours. We provided the wage increases equivalent to the late-night working and distributed the various free light breakfasts. Right away, we started to see the results.
After 8:00 A.M., the overtime was reduced from 30% to 5%, and 10:00 P.M. or later was reduced from 10% to almost zero. Also, power usage, tax affairs were reduced. This measure was quite astonishing before, but many employees and union welcomed this. This created a lot of reaction, and hundreds of companies and organizations wanted to visit us, and we accepted all of them and provided all the know-hows that we had. Government also focused on this. In June 2014, this was included in Japan Revitalization Strategy. In 2015, the Keidanren actually communicated this to the companies based on the recommendation of the government. Government also started Yukatsu activity. This created a powerful surge. We had recognized that the employee's health is a foundation for the development of stakeholders. We had very good medical care.
In 2016, we formulated ITOCHU Health Charter, saying that the employee's health is a foundation of the stakeholder development. This is available from our website, and you can see the improvement of the health indicators shown on the right-hand side. Next is support measures for balancing cancer care and work. This started with one story moving our company. In 2017, an employee battling long-term cancer sent an email to then President, Mr. Okafuji. At that time, an economic journal did the ranking on the happy companies, and we were ranked the second. This employee got to know this, and he was treated so well by the senior workers, colleagues, and younger workers. This employee wrote in the email, "For me, ITOCHU is the best company in Japan. He wants to overcome cancer and wants to come back to work for the company." Mr.
Okafuji was so moved, and with the consent of the employee, he made this public in the intranet and appealed to all the employees to pray for this employee so that he can come back to work. Unfortunately, two weeks later, this person passed away. Attending his funeral, President Okafuji promised to make ITOCHU the best company in Japan, as he wept, and sent a message to all the employees. As a result, in July 2017, he sent a message to all the employees, "Don't lose to the cancer." Not to get cancer, or even if you get cancer, you will get the most advanced care. Also, even if the employees die, the bereaved families will be taken care of.
Regardless of the number of the children, the company will give the financial support until the children finish the graduate school of the private universities. Also, if the spouses want to find a work, the company will take all the initiatives to find a post. If children want to work in the future for ITOCHU, the ITOCHU group will find a position for the children. He ended the message saying that, "You belong here, and the employees are family." This created the waves of reaction and empathy inside the company. This was widely reported. Therefore, we received so many emails and letters from outside. Many of those messages were quite moving. Mr. Okafuji responded to all of those messages. This shows the content of these support measures of the balancing cancer care and work.
They are divided into prevention, treatment, and coexistence. I will just touch upon the red part: alliance with National Cancer Center Research Institute and providing the special checkups and providing full company assistance for expense for advanced cancer treatment and construction of support system for balancing cancer care and work. There's a very important point that I'd like to convey when we talk about these support measures. One person in two in Japan gets cancer. If you look at the women, younger women suffer from cancer, as you can see here, while they are still working. In the case of a male, the cancer rate becomes higher at the older age. This is because of the fact that the gynecologic cancer hit women at the early age, and it is twice or three times higher, the cancer rate, for women than men.
This is something that we cannot avoid when we think about the empowerment of women. We want to make sure that even when the women get cancer, they do not have to give up work. If the company wishes to empower women, we have to have the infrastructure so that the women can continue to work. We have to avoid the sustainability in that sense to be limited. This policy was widely awarded by the ministry and also other organizations. We are very honored to receive those awards. Now, when we have consent from the employees, we will provide all the health checkup data to the National Cancer Center Research Institute because usually, the institute will get the data only after the employees go to this research institute.
If they can get additional data before employees get sick, this would be very important information in the research of cancer as well as for the treatment of the patients. Now, let me talk about the COVID-19 pandemic countermeasures that we have taken for more than two years. There is one concept that is our commitment to the front lines. Even during the pandemic, our customers are at the forefront. Supermarkets have abundant merchandise and products anytime you go there. Convenience stores continue to operate, and deliveries are made without interruption. All of those daily necessities are provided by people working at the forefront. For us, this business is important. In order to make sure that the employees are safe, we started to have very strict prevention measures for the infection, and we changed the work system flexibly 24 times.
Last year, when the workplace vaccination started, we were one of the fastest to start this. Actually, then the Chief Cabinet Secretary, Taro Kono, visited us. As one of the first workplace vaccinations, we provided the information about the layout and the manual and the record of the vaccination through our website. We accepted all the requests for the visits from outside so that we can improve and help the other workplace vaccinations. We also provided the vaccination for the 1,500 childcare facility staff. This led to the local governments following suit. This is based on the spirit of Sampo Yoshi, that is, "We are not doing this only for our company, but also for the society." This quick workplace vaccination gave us an opportunity to meet with then Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, and he gave us very warm words of appreciation.
Now, let me talk about quantitative achievements of our workstyle reforms. From the beginning, we wanted to achieve the improvement of the labor productivity. After the beginning, at the end of fiscal year ending March 2022, this has improved 5.2 times. Next is the returns to the stakeholders. The dividend increased 6.1 times and share price 4.4 times. We are making sure that we make returns to the shareholders. We are committed to the minimum level of the dividend at JPY 130 per share in the fiscal year ending March 2023. That means that more than seven times. Employee annual salary increased more than 20% during this time. We are now moving on to the next stage. Last year, we established the Women's Advancement Committee as one of the advisory committees to the Board of Directors. This is chaired by Ms. Muraki, our outside director.
This committee is validating our measures of the workstyle improvement and also providing us with the new proposals. We are promoting the selection and promotion of the female executives. I think there are similar committees like this, but it's very rare to have this as one of the advisory committees to the BOD. This committee will be regularly reporting to BOD so that we can expand the environment where women can engage more and succeed. Once every two, three years, we conduct a major engagement survey with the employees. In terms of the motivation of the employees, among the leading companies, we are in the top class. If you compare the numbers with that of three years ago, there were some lower numbers, especially among the young generation and women. We believe that we need to develop measures that respond to the diversification of the values.
As I mentioned, based on the assumptions that we have, we need to move on to the next stage. Starting with May, we started to introduce the Morning-Focused Flex Time System to provide more flexibility. Even under non-pandemic times, people can combine the work-from-home and the Morning-Focused Flex Time System and allow us to balance the engagement in work and childbearing and the need for the infertility treatment. The holidays or the leaves are provided so that the work and life balance can be established regardless of the agenda. Now, let's talk about the relationship between the workstyle reform and sustainability. Earlier, I mentioned that Mr. Okafuji wanted to make the company number one in Japan. What does number one in Japan mean? Is it in terms of the market cap or profit? There are different factors, and there's no clear definition.
These days, a sustainable company is a good company, and I don't think many people will say no to that. Next, based on that assumption, I'd like to show you the next page. From 2023 graduates, this is the company ranking among those job seekers. Fortunately, we were number one among the trading companies. In one of the four of those media, which are shown in red, we were number one among all companies. How do the young people graduating from university choose a company? High salary or working abroad? There are different reasons, but they are choosing a company where they might spend decades of their lives. They would choose a sustainable company. In that sense, at least from the students' perspective, we are getting close to becoming one of the most sustainable companies. Next page. This is something that came out recently.
It shows the changes of the birth rate among our employees. Since the beginning of setting up the in-house childcare facility in 2010, we have seen the increase of the birth rate and reached 1.97 at the end of March 2022 in response to the workstyle reform and health management. This exceeds 1.33 of the national average and 1.13 of Tokyo. Especially, this gained momentum since we introduced the morning-focused working system. The trading company appears to be dominated by men, but when the women join our company and go through life events, we want to make sure that they can continue to work without giving up work. I think this number or graph proves that we have a very employee-friendly and gender-equal environment, and I encourage all the female students who are interested to apply for the job here.
The next page shows the external evaluation, including DJSI. We are ranked number one among the trading companies. As I said, if you look at our workstyle reform from the sustainability perspective, what is the characteristic? I think that our reform is based upon the spirit of Sampo Yoshi and based on the commitment to the front lines. Sustainable companies need to have a resiliency to respond to the rapid changes in the society. Subtle changes will lead to the major environmental changes. I think that the commitment to the front line will make it possible for us to respond to those situations. Sustainable is very important for the companies. The sustainable company is supported by all the employees and each one of the merchants who are willing to make returns to the society.
Their efforts will grow a company and create a social model and lead to the sustainability in the society. This is the end of my part of the presentation. When we talk about sustainability, we tend to focus more on the clean energy, which is the major theme. Unlike other trading companies who focus more on the natural resources, we are very much focused on the daily lives of people. In the market, we want to make the whole market greener. That is something that we are trying to do. I think that is our way of workstyle reform, which is based upon Sampo Yoshi's spirit, and that would push up our corporate value. We'll make sure that we will maintain this commitment to the front lines and try to improve the corporate value.
I ask for your support, and I hope that my presentation was helpful in some ways. Next, we have Ms. Atsuko Muraki, Outside Director. Thank you. I am Muraki, Outside Director. I would like to talk about the evaluations from the macro perspective of the country. Now, from the macro perspective, the workstyle reform and empowerment of women, those gained momentum in the past 10 years or so. As a background, we have falling birth rate and aging population. This expands the social security burden, and the fiscal deficit also increased, which needs to be paid by the future generation. We needed to do something. At that time, we increased the consumption tax and also tried to make the social security system more focused and efficient. It was a very tough reform. At that time, this reform was called reforms with pain.
Frankly speaking, this was something that we have to do, but we cannot do it many times because it was so tough. How can we make this more forward-looking reforms? That was the discussion we had. We focused upon the empowerment of women. By empowering women, we can increase the number of the children who can support the society in the future. We were discussing the policies. The graph that the government was focused on is shown here on the right-hand side. The horizontal axis is the women's employment ratio of different countries. If you go to the right, that means that more women are working. The vertical axis shows the total fertility rate. When more women work, the birth rate or fertility rate increases. There are countries where both the employment ratio and fertility rate are high.
Why is it not like this in Japan? What are the obstacles? We discussed those matters. As a result, we found out the reasons. First of all, the long work hours and also the atmosphere of the workplaces were the reasons. That is to say that when are working for a long time, the women found it difficult to leave early because of the children. In order to empower women and increase the number of children, regardless of the gender, we recognized that we needed to reform the workstyles. Finally, we started to recognize that need. There is another data that we are very much focused upon. The graph shown on the left-hand side, this shows the hours per day the husbands engage in the homemaking and child-rearing in households with children younger than six years old.
As you can see, in Japan, it's 1 hour and 23 minutes, but in the United States and Europe, it's 2 hours or 3 hours. This means that both husbands and wives working and taking care of children. This was the model that the Western countries have already shifted to. In those countries, they have high women's employment ratio and high fertility rate. The graph in the middle is the Japanese data. The lower bars represent the longer hours that the husbands spend on homemaking and child-rearing. The blue means the women remain in the same workplace. More interesting data is on the right-hand side. This is the ratio of the couples who gave birth to two or more children based on the hours spent by husbands for homemaking and child-rearing during holidays.
In order for a country to become sustainable, we cannot avoid the workstyle reform. We have found out about this from the macro perspective. What about individual companies, whether they can do very drastic workstyle reforms? At that time, the morning-focused working system of ITOCHU was quite sensational for the government. We thought that finally there is a company with bold measures. Some data, ITOCHU's data that I felt quite interesting and impressed with, is shown here. This is the ratio of married male employees with working wives. The one on the left is 2001, and the one on the right is 2022. As you can see, the ratio of the married male employees with working wives is so high. What kind of lifestyle do they want to have? How can they make sure that they can enjoy both work and home life?
When we asked the question to ITOCHU employees about the reasons why women at ITOCHU believe they can continue to work while engaging in child-rearing, the highest answer was that the workstyle options and workstyle reform. Another was the atmosphere at workplaces. Those match with what we found out from the macro perspective. To make sure that we have a good workstyle reform for both men and women will lead to higher satisfaction of the work life as well as private life. This has been proven by ITOCHU. As Mr. Kobayashi mentioned, it's extremely important to have an employee-friendly company. In addition, there has to be a sense of fulfillment. Whether ITOCHU can realize both is something that I'd like to make sure that I watch over as one of the outside directors. Thank you for your attention.