Today, I'd like to talk to you about a word that holds a very special place for Sony - KANDO. The direct translation of the word into English is "Emotion." But KANDO means more than that in Japanese.

It captures feelings of deep emotional connections and experiences when watching a movie, listening to music or playing a game. For us at Sony, KANDO is what we strive to create and deliver to our customers in all aspects of our work. KANDO is at the core of who we are.

Our founders created Sony in 1946, with the dream to enrich people's lives through the power of technology - a world where technology can deliver new experiences, lifestyles, and KANDO.

Driven by this vision, we have delivered innovative products, creating entirely new industries and customer experiences along the way.
With each era of technology - from analog to digital, the Internet and the Cloud - Sony has reinvented itself again and again.

Today, Sony is more than a hardware technology company. We are also a leader in Entertainment - across Games, Music, Pictures, Anime.
There is no other company in the world like Sony with the depth of our business portfolio and touch points with fans and creators.

One of the most remarkable successes this year is the movie Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle. As of late November, this film has become the highest-ever grossing Japanese film released worldwide and 5th highest-grossing film across all categories in 2025.

As we've done with Demon Slayer, we hope to keep delivering new KANDO by marrying the creator's vision with a deep understanding of their fans.
And our relationship with AWS plays a pivotal role to make this happen.

One example which started in the early 2010s when I was president of the network service company for PlayStation® and other Sony devices (former Sony Network Entertainment International). We chose AWS as our provider for its global footprint, high standards in availability, and scalability.

Today, our relationship with AWS supports a safe, secure, and high-quality gaming experience for up to 129 million gamers to connect and experience KANDO together.

Moving forward we see incredible potential for growing the fan community connecting fans with similar tastes and interests across our diverse portfolio of content IPs.

At the same time, we also want to better serve our Creator community by providing them with more tool connections and insights to their fan base.

We call this the Sony Engagement Platform creating deeper understanding and connection between the Fans who experience content and the Creators, who are making it.

And one of the building blocks for the Engagement Platform is the Sony Data Ocean. It utilizes data insights generated from multiple connected data lakes.

Of course, to make the most effective use of our data and deliver KANDO to our customers, we have to effectively harness the power of AI and AI agents to empower our employees and augment our business capabilities.

To maximize our productivity in the enterprise setting, we are actively promoting the usage of Generative AI. Our home-grown Enterprise LLM built using Amazon Bedrock has over 57,000 users today since its introduction 2 years ago, and we are serving 150,000 inference requests per day.

And today, we are integrating new agentic capabilities into our platform to enable a new level of advanced operational efficiency across our businesses.

This way, we gain the ability to easily govern, deploy and manage more useful agentic capabilities to accelerate our enterprise AI transformation.

In addition to the enterprise setting, Sony is fully committed to the responsible and ethical development and use of AI in the creative domain. We hold ourselves against the highest standard and respect towards the rights of creators and performers.

So where are we going from here?

We will continue to create and deliver KANDO - fulfilling the aspirations of both fans and creators, building meaningful connections between them.

In the future, we will continue to expand our fan's engagement with their favorite content IP across multiple entertainment genres.

As we have done with Uncharted and The Last of Us, we hope to connect fans and creators in both virtual and physical environments, including Location Based Entertainment.

Realizing our vision will require even greater and stronger collaboration with AWS as well as our creative and technology partners in the audience.

We look forward to creating and delivering even greater KANDO to our fans across the world.