Seventh Japan Innovators Award – the Grand Prize Goes to Mr. Atsumasa Tochisako for His Microfinance

Tokyo – October 29, 2008 – Nikkei Business Publications (President & CEO: Yasuo Hirata; Tokyo) has announced the winners of the seventh Japan Innovators Award. Established in 2002 and now in the seventh year, the Award aims to stimulate the country by shedding light on unique and innovative individuals.

In the face of pressing global warming and other environmental and energy issues, new technologies and new business models are considered to be indispensible for Japan to ensure sustainable growth in the future while coping with the aging population and falling birthrate. The nomination was made from individuals from a broad range of fields who have breathed new life into Japanese industries by creating new universal values since this spring. The winners were decided by the final selection committee held the other day. The awarding will take place at 5 p.m. on November 27 at Grand Prince Hotel Takanawa, Tokyo.

【Winners】

【Comments】
The purpose of Japan Innovators Award is to recognize those Japanese people who strive to pioneer new markets with unique ideas and technologies. This year, as in the past years, the winners were selected for their spirit and courage to bring fresh air into the Japanese economy and their great contribution to creation of new markets and business models. Points of recognition for each award winner are as follows.

The Grand Prize winner Mr. Atsumasa Tochisako offers affordable remittance, microfinance, and other financial services to Latin American immigrants working in North America and addresses problems of poverty in the U.S. Currently, more than fifty million Latin American migrants work in North America and send 66 billion dollars to their homes yearly. Nevertheless, few financial institutions had gone into such services fully, and the remittance had been handled mostly by remittance agents. Such agents tend to charge high handling fees, often above 10%, which results in a smaller share of money that the migrants' families back home can receive. Mr. Tochisako founded Microfinance Corporation in Washington in 2003 to improve the situation and developed an Internet-based remittance / payment system with low handling fees of about 3.5%.

He also encourages new businesses in developing countries by lending the dormant funds, which are generated in the process of remittance, to local financial institutions to support industrial development in the region. This business model achieves an increase in consumption and business development at the same time and promotes economic development in developing countries. The total amount of remittance by immigrants worldwide is estimated to be over 300 billion dollars, and Mr. Tochisako is seeking to expand his services to Africa an Asia, too. The social contribution that Mr. Tochisako had made to support migrants in poverty and the new potentiality that he had shown for financial business from a completely new perspective won him the Grand Prize.

The Excellence Prize winner Mr. Takaaki Ito has developed "Olyset®," a mosquito net that prevents malaria infection. Malaria affects 3-5 hundred million people in the world every year, taking more than a million lives a year. The 90 percent of the patients are people living in Africa, and the victims are mostly children under 6. Mr. Ito has established the technology to knead the insecticide against anopheles – a malaria vector – into the mosquito net and release the ingredients slowly over a period of time. He has also cooperated with local manufacturer to build a fabrication plant for the mosquito net and contributed to creation of employment by promoting locally-based production. While Japanese aids often tend to be merely financial ones, the idea of linking prevention of malaria with creation of employment was evaluated highly. Sumitomo Chemical considers the Olyset® project to be a companywide mission and is now preparing to expand the manufacturing capacity of the local joint-venture plant from the current 30 million nets to 50 million nets yearly. The UN and the WHO recommend use of the Olyset® nets as a preventive measure against this fatal disease of malaria in Africa; it is a well-known episode that, in 2005, American actress Sharon Stone referred to the Olyset® nets and called for donations at the Davos Congress held in Switzerland, and a total of one million dollars was raised within 10 minutes.

The other Excellence Award winner Mr. Yoshimitus Kuroda is the president of Fine Parts, a Yokohama-based company developing and manufacturing ultrasmall springs. Such springs are used, for example, in cell phones, now spread all over the world. Fine Parts has a nearly 90 percent global share in terms of the 1 mm outer-diameter springs used in cell phones to connect the battery and the main body, Mr. Kuroda says. The microminiature springs manufactured by the company range widely from probes for energization tests for semiconductor parts to ballpoint pen tips, and those for probes are finer than women's hair, with the outer diameter of 65 micro meters (micro = 1/million). These ultrasmall springs are indispensible for the cutting-edge digital devices. Mr. Kuroda founded the company as he, then an automobile salesperson, had come to realize the potentiality of ultrasmall springs in the course of his conversation with his client companies. Fine Parts represents the high engineering ability that small- and medium-sized Japanese companies can offer to the world, and the Award was given for Mr. Kuroda's foresight and the technological and developmental abilities of this small company with only 32 employees to make manufacturing of such small-sized springs a reality.

Selection Committee
Chairman

Members （in the order of the Japanese syllabary）

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