Message from the GM of Intellectual Property Division

To put our Group Purpose, “Giving our world more smiles,” into practice, the Fujifilm Group aims to change the world one step at a time by bringing together diverse people, knowledge and technologies to turn original ideas into innovation. The intellectual assets created throughout our business activities form the core of our intangible assets. We secure legal protection for these assets through patents, trademarks and design rights, and appropriately safeguard trade secrets and know-how. Through proactive intellectual property (IP) activities aligned with our business strategies, we use intellectual property to establish competitive advantages, create new business opportunities and enhance brand value, thereby driving sustained growth in corporate value.

Reporting directly to the CEO, our Intellectual Property Division works to protect and leverage intellectual assets created within the Fujifilm Group. Its teams cover IP technology, legal affairs and external relations, standardization, and planning and operations. They work with the Group’s R&D and business divisions, including those at overseas sites, from the early stages of development and commercialization. The division holds an annual IP Strategy Meeting for each business, bringing together the heads of the business, R&D and IP divisions to discuss short-, medium-, and long-term IP issues and initiatives. Together, they pursue IP activities that support sustained business growth.

The division also works with the Fujifilm Design Center, whose involvement spans product and service planning, development and promotion. Together, they consider customer value from various perspectives, including technology, design, brands and user experience, and secure appropriate IP protection for each to strengthen the competitiveness of our products and services. Drawing on its connections with all R&D and business divisions, the Intellectual Property Division also serves as a hub linking businesses and Group companies. It supports technological collaboration and helps create new value by combining technologies and knowledge.

The Fujifilm Group builds economic moats through strong brands, high market shares and superior features and services that competitors cannot easily match. To achieve this, we assess business opportunities through three perspectives: “Is the market growing?” “Can our technologies make a difference?” and “Can we maintain our competitiveness?” We pursue growth by adapting and transforming our businesses accordingly. The Group’s IP activities go beyond securing rights for proprietary technologies and addressing risks associated with third-party intellectual property. We are broadening our activities to proactively identify business opportunities by analyzing IP, technology and market information, helping build economic moats.

IP activities aligned with the business portfolio

As part of our business portfolio management, which is aligned with our management strategy, we tailor IP activities to each business’s stage of growth and competitive environment. For example, for New/Future Potential businesses, we analyze technology trends and future needs to provide IP intelligence that helps identify business opportunities. With an eye to shaping future markets, we also focus on building IP portfolios that secure broad protection for emerging technologies, including those not yet available in the market. For Growth Driver businesses, meanwhile, we secure IP rights for technologies that differentiate products and services and build portfolios informed by competitors’ activities to establish and maintain competitive advantages. At the same time, we identify risks associated with other companies’ intellectual property and work to mitigate potential obstacles to business growth. By setting IP priorities according to each business’s position and strategic direction, we support growth across the Group’s diverse businesses.

Intellectual property portfolio management aligned with corporate strategy

IP governance supporting global business expansion

The Fujifilm Group holds IP strategy meetings to discuss short-, medium-, and long-term IP issues and initiatives in line with business strategies. With overseas revenue accounting for about two-thirds of the total and product development taking place around the world, we have increasingly held these meetings at overseas sites in recent years. In the Semiconductor Materials business, for example, we have built a global R&D network based on the concept of “local production, local consumption and local support.” To ensure that technologies and development outcomes from each region strengthen the competitiveness of the entire business, local development and IP divisions work with the headquarters IP division to implement coherent IP strategies informed by customer needs and business strategies. These efforts have helped increase patent applications by overseas subsidiaries, providing IP support for the global expansion of the Semiconductor Materials business.

Since 2023, we have also held an annual Global IP Summit, bringing together the heads of IP divisions at development sites around the world. Through face-to-face discussions, participants exchange views on the IP issues faced by each company and site and potential solutions. They also share progress on digital transformation in IP operations, a shared priority. Through these initiatives, we are strengthening IP governance across the Group and enhancing our IP activities through mutual learning.

Enhancing the effectiveness of IP strategy by linking financial and IP data for each business

We continuously evaluate the IP portfolios we build and manage for each business segment in terms of their business value and cost-effectiveness. Based on these assessments, we strengthen or streamline each portfolio to keep it optimized and up to date. For patents, for example, we compile
metrics for each business, including citation-based measures of patent value, quantitative metrics of invention activity, the number of patents held and patent management costs. By linking this IP data with financial data, we have established a system that makes the relationship between IP investment and business results visible for each business. We will also analyze comparable metrics for competitors to objectively assess the competitiveness of the Group’s IP portfolios. Using this data as a common basis for evaluation with business leaders and senior management will help inform decisions on IP investment priorities and portfolio optimization. We view IP as an investment that supports business growth, rather than simply counting the rights we hold. By analyzing IP and financial metrics together, we aim to improve the cost-effectiveness of IP investment and refine resource allocation to support business growth.

* A management information analysis system for internal use within the Fujifilm Group. It shares Group companies’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) data in the cloud and visualizes KPIs such as profit and loss (P&L), cash conversion cycle (CCC) and purchasing expenditure for each business and company.

We will also use our IP management system as the central platform, strengthening its connections with external IP databases, our contract information management system, apps developed within the Intellectual Property Division, and systems containing management and financial information. This will provide a consolidated view of IP information and enhance IP management as a whole.

In this way, we continuously manage our company-wide IP portfolio in light of each business’s position in the business portfolio, our global R&D network, and IP and financial data. In the early 2000s, patents relating to photographic materials and copiers made up a large share of our holdings. Since then, we have prioritized IP investment in Healthcare and Electronics, in line with our management strategy identifying these as growth areas. As a result, patents in these growth areas now account for more than half of all patents held, illustrating how we have transformed our IP portfolio to support future business growth.

We strategically adjust the composition of our IP portfolio in line with changes in our business portfolio.

The Fujifilm Group takes a broad view of intellectual property, encompassing the sources of customer value found in technology, brands, design and user experience. We protect this value through an “IP mix” combining different forms of IP protection. By analyzing this value from multiple perspectives and strategically combining patents, design rights, trademarks, know-how and other IP to protect the sources of value that appeal to customers, we support product and service differentiation and build lasting competitive advantages.

For example, in our Imaging business, we protect instax through production know-how that supports film quality and reliable supply, as well as patents covering the photography and printing experiences our products and services offer. We also protect our products’ distinctive appearance through design rights, and names, logos and taglines that convey the instax brand’s identity and appeal to customers through trademarks. For the instax mini Evo Cinema, the Intellectual Property Division has been involved since the product planning stage. Guided by the product concept and the value it offers, the division is pursuing patent applications for relevant functions, trademark applications and design applications covering its distinctive vertical design. This multifaceted IP mix safeguards the distinctive instax experiential value and brand identity, makes it more difficult for competitors to imitate these distinctive features, and supports lasting competitive advantages and business growth.

Our Intellectual Property Division has a dedicated team that analyzes publicly available information, including patent documents, technical papers and online sources, and shares its findings with management and business divisions. Since 2007, well before the term “IP landscape” became widely used, we have combined objective insights from public sources on market and technology trends and competitors’ investment trends with practical knowledge gained through our business activities and insights into social trends. This provides the basis for analysis from multiple perspectives. We distill the findings into “IP intelligence” that supports decision-making by senior management and business leaders.

The figure below maps the IP intelligence we provide across two axes: “what we search for” and “why we search.”

In every case, our analysis starts with the entire value chain and developments among major players, rather than focusing solely on individual technologies or companies. Through ongoing dialogue with business divisions, we provide information to help assess business opportunities and potential risks by asking, “Does the market offer sufficient growth potential?” and “Can we put our technologies and strengths to use?” This supports better-informed management decisions.

Rule-making that supports value creation

The Fujifilm Group incorporates rule-making into its business models to help ensure that the value of its products and technologies is recognized and realized in society. By establishing new evaluation criteria through international standardization and demonstrating customer-perceived value clearly and objectively, we build competitive advantages and facilitate market creation. These activities draw on our ability to transfer knowledge across our diverse businesses and the expertise of our people who lead international standardization efforts.

Across both growth areas and mature businesses, we identify what customers truly value and help establish rules that make this value more widely understood. In photographic printing, for example, we helped establish a method for evaluating gloss as an international standard (ISO/TS 20791-3), enabling us to demonstrate the distinctive appeal of silver halide photographic prints objectively.

We will continue to establish rules that appropriately assess customer value, helping reveal previously unrecognized value in existing markets and strengthen our competitiveness. These efforts will support sustained business growth and enhance corporate value.

Standardization that delivers social value

The Fujifilm Group promotes standardization to encourage wider adoption of products and technologies that help address social issues, including environmental challenges and resource circularity. By developing and promoting international, national and industry standards, we support real-world adoption, helping create new social value and drive business growth.

In the office equipment field, for example, we are leading efforts to internationally standardize definitions and product requirements for remanufactured and refurbished products to help realize a circular economy. By establishing common rules that support resource circularity, we help expand circular business models and create markets.

As a company-wide initiative, we also help develop environmental performance labeling standards, in collaboration with the ESG Division and the Government Relations Division. By making environmental value visible through credible standards, we help create market conditions in which that value is properly recognized and assessed.

Through standardization, we will continue to promote the real-world adoption of products and technologies that help address social issues, fostering a virtuous cycle in which progress toward a sustainable society, the creation of new social value and business growth reinforce one another.

Highlighting some of the external evaluations we have received

Top 100 Global Innovators™ 2026

Clarivate, which provides information, including patent trends, that drives societal innovation, published the 2026 list of the Top 100 Global Innovators™, and Fujifilm was selected.

The Clarivate AI50 2026

FUJIFILM Holdings has been selected as one of 50 organizations worldwide recognized for innovation in AI in the Clarivate AI50 report, published by Clarivate, a leading global provider of transformative intelligence. First published this year, the report draws on patent data for AI-related inventions to assess their influence, success, rarity and international reach. It examines in depth how organizations advance AI innovation, from developing foundational AI technologies and integrating them into complex systems to deploying them in products, business processes and industrial environments.

IAM Asia IP Elite 2026

The Asia IP Elite award recognizes companies that excel in creating IP value, as selected by IAM (Intellectual Asset Management). To be selected as a member of the Asia IP Elite, a company must place IP strategy at the center of its business and generate sustained value from intellectual property. In 2026, we were selected as one of the 98 companies from Asia.

Ranked No. 1 in the chemical industry in 2025 for patent asset scale and competitive strength

Patent Result Co., Ltd., is a company that builds and analyzes databases on Japanese patents, evaluating corporate patent competitiveness and publishing industry-specific rankings. In 2025, Fujifilm ranked first in the chemical industry for patent asset scale. In addition, we have maintained the top position in the same industry for patent competitiveness since 2012.

Fiscal 2025 Industrial Standardization Awards (Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Award)

At the award ceremony

FUJIFILM Holdings takes an integrated view of intangible assets such as intellectual property, brands, R&D and design as a key foundation of its management strategy. These assets are also a recurring focus of Board of Directors discussions. Relatively few companies in Japan place intangible assets at the heart of management in this way and explicitly consider their links to business strategy and medium- to long-term corporate value creation.

Intangible assets have become increasingly important to enhancing corporate value. The Corporate Governance Code, revised in July 2026, also highlights the importance of clearly explaining how investment in intangible assets contributes to enhancing corporate value. However, their value is harder to measure directly than that of financial capital, making it difficult for investors and other stakeholders to fully understand their contribution. I believe that, particularly for Japanese companies, the difficulty of clearly demonstrating how intangible assets create value is one obstacle to being fairly valued in the capital markets.

In this regard, the Fujifilm Group presents a coherent narrative linking intangible assets, including intellectual property, to its growth strategy, and actively engages with investors and other stakeholders. Rather than simply reporting patent holdings and R&D expenditure, it explains how intangible assets underpin business growth and a competitive advantage. I regard this as a particular strength of the Company.

I look forward to further improvements in disclosures on intangible assets. In particular, clearer links between IP information and financial data, showing how IP-related outcomes contribute to profitability and growth, would deepen investors’ understanding. I believe the Fujifilm Group’s efforts to make the connection between IP information and corporate value visible represent a pioneering approach that sets a benchmark for corporate disclosure in Japan. These efforts will play an important role in helping investors understand the competitive advantages underpinned by intangible assets and ensuring that these are appropriately reflected in the Company’s valuation.

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