In recent years, measures to achieve economic growth in harmony with the global environment have been increasingly discussed on an international level. Since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the national governments have been taking various measures for the sustainable development that enables both environmental conservation and economic expansion. This year, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Earth Summit.
Honda announced Honda Environment Statement in 1992 and as a vision for the 21st century decided to become a company that people can look up to. Based on the idea, we have been aggressively conducting environmental conservation activities throughout our business domains.
For the specific progresses made in fiscal 2001, we input the i-DSI engine to the market, which is characterized by higher fuel efficiency and improved exhaust gas cleaning ability and released CIVIC Hybrid in the products domain. In the purchasing domain, we formulated the green purchasing guidelines and explained them to suppliers. In the production domain, we promoted renovation to reduce the consumption of energy and started the operation of the Hamamatsu Factory's Hosoe Plant as a benchmark plant for our environmental activities. In the sales and services domain, we developed the Green Dealer System to encourage our dealers to contribute to the environmental conservation and to please customers through such contribution. As part of the system, we started to certify "Best Green Dealers." Besides to implement the world's top-level environmental management, we built the Honda LCA System to quantify the environmental impacts of all our business domains.
We announced the objectives for 2005 in 1999, which are to improve the fuel economy of automobiles, motorcycles and power products and to realize cleaner exhaust gases. So far, we have steadily achieved results more rapidly than the originally planned pace. For example, for improving the fuel economy of automobiles, we set the goal of improving the economy by 25% compared with the level of 1995 to attain the fiscal 2010 target value for fuel economy set by the revised Energy Savings Law. As a result of making great efforts, we have improved the economy by approximately 30% by inputting new products such as Fit in the market, thus greatly exceeding the original target of 25%.
In all of our business domains, we will further promote the measures to achieve the objective for 2005 as early as possible and will aggressively contribute to local and the global environment.
This Report sums up our results for each fiscal year and is published annually to keep the public informed of our progress. We would feel our efforts were fully rewarded if our readers were kind enough to let us have the benefit of their frank opinions and reactions in response to their perusal of this Report.