Iino Lines recognizes that nothing is more important than safety in the shipping industry, and regards safety as one of the highest priority issues to be addressed by the management. We are proud of our performance to date in maintaining high safety standards.
However, for our customers, it does not suffice for us to say that we have absolute confidence in our ability to provide safe operation except for those customers with whom we have been in business for many years. If the services, products or materials that a customer chooses are defective, it can negatively reflect on their reputation, and we cannot satisfy our customers just by explaining that we offer the highest quality service.
Rather, we have to show our customers objective proof that we are making a continuous, systematic effort to maintain high quality service, in our case, safe shipping operations. Therefore we are extremely pleased to have received the relevant ISO qualification for the maritime transport business following certification of our ship management company IMS in 1994, and we regard it as a highly significant achievement. (March 22, 2004, Accredited Certification Body: ClassNK)
While we have always taken environmental protection into account, unlike shipping operations, it is not the goal of our business. Since environmental protection is a matter of how we minimize the damage on environment, we are yet to have clear internal consensus as to what environmental protection includes and what we have to do. Therefore by adopting and conforming to the international standards established in ISO14001, we aim to better our achievements in this area.
With both ISO9001 and 14001 we will not take a formalistic approach by doing only the minimum required. Instead we intend to implement the requirements based on an understanding of their true purpose. In addition, we will use the experience gained from implementing ISO and contribute the gains made through our ingenuity to the development of ISO itself. Furthermore from this summer we plan to announce "Environmental Accounting" in which we hope to use our experience of implementing ISO.
In the near future we also aim to gain ISO certification for our real estate business, in order to achieve more efficient company-wide management of quality control and environmental protection.