News Release

Japan Pulp and Paper Co., Ltd. (JP, President Kenzo Noguchi, headquartered Tokyo Japan), JP's subsidiary Arise Innovation, Inc. (Arise Innovation, CEO Hitoshi Iwasawa, headquartered Tokyo Japan), and Tokyo System House Co., Ltd. (TSH, President Tomoyuki Hayashi, headquartered Tokyo Japan) have reached an agreement to obtain partial existing stock equity from JasmineSoft Co., Ltd. (JasmineSoft, President Yoshinori Nie, headquartered Okinawa Japan) and to undertake new shares issued by JasmineSoft through third-party allocations.

Based upon this capital injection, Arise Innovation, TSH and JasmineSoft will strengthen business alliances among the three, and further cooperate on the development and sales of the software package "Wagby" initially created by JasmineSoft.

1. Purpose of Investment

In order to expand its ICT business, JP, together with TSH, established Arise Innovation in past June. Main business of this joint venture spans from Enterprise AI services, Rapid Application Development(RAD) *1 and Cloud services. On the AI solution front, Arise Innovation has been focusing on the development of a logistics system specialized in the paper industry by capitalizing JP's long-time industry knowhow. On the other hand, JasmineSoft is a highly reputable vendor of RAD tools, and has been selected on the Rising Vendor List by Gartner. The list was published in the May 2016 issue of the "Cool Vendors in Application Development, 2016" report.

Upon completion of this investment, not only Arise Innovation will be able to fortify its RAD business centering around JasmineSoft-developed "Wagby" *2 tool, but increase the efficiency of the logistics business with enhanced RAD based system development at the same time. Taking advantage of the 20% plus annual RAD market’s growth rate, JasmineSoft plans to vigorously expand its business presence to also include overseas by leveraging vast customer base, advanced technologies and marketing power possessed by both JP Group and TSH.

JP is eager to build up strong business partnerships with Arise Innovation, TSH as well as JasmineSoft in order to thrust forward the ICT business.

(*1) Rapid Application Development
Software development tool and/or methodology used to shorten coding costs and cycles when developing business applications. The ultra-high productivity solves hassles associated with traditional-style system development.

(*2) "Wagby"
Automatically generates programs of business logics, screens and database schemas from design spec sheets - without any programming. Compatible with PCs, tablets and smartphones. A total of 318 companies have deployed Wagby over the past decade (as of Oct. 31, 2016).