Health and Safety

Kioxia Group’s senior managers in Japan all pledge to ensure health and safety across our operations, a pledge that is shared with all employees. Kioxia Corporation established its Basic Policy for Safety and Health at the time of the company’s foundation in 2017, and it reviews the policy annually to ensure it continues to meet the needs of the times. Kioxia Group in Japan has subsequently formulated its own policy and is accordingly implementing a range of health and safety initiatives.

Each overseas group company implements employee health and safety initiatives in accordance with the laws and regulations of their respective countries and regions.

Kioxia Group in Japan deploys health and safety supervisors within the Administration Division of each group company to promote health and safety activities among employees. They report periodically on health and safety matters to the President of each group company. The Health and Safety Officer of the Human Resources and Administration Division of Kioxia Corporation summarizes these reports and shares the summaries with the President and CEO, and the Executive Officer in charge of Human Resources.

Since January 2021, Kioxia Group has been pursuing the acquisition of occupational health and safety management systems certification (ISO 45001:2018) for its manufacturing and R&D sites. As it moves to comply with the requirements for this certification, Kioxia Group is making efforts to continuously reduce health and safety risks through risk assessment and compliance with relevant laws and regulations, and is making its health and safety management measures more visible.

Kioxia Group is also committed to ensuring health and safety are maintained throughout the day-to-day activities of our organization and our employees. Our efforts include the creation of small workplace groups which undertake a variety of activities on an ongoing basis; these encompass workplace improvement programs, education and training to increase risk awareness among employees, and monitoring to ensure that appropriate practices are being followed. We integrate these activities into our implementation of health and safety management based on ISO 45001 standards. 

Kioxia Group in Japan endeavors to enhance our employees' understanding of the need for health and safety and for supportive behavior. On top of the training specified by the Industrial Safety and Health Act, we implement education programs for employees who are newly appointed to health and safety-related posts, as well as for mid-career employees in health and safety-related positions. We also run practical training programs devised by individual operational sites.

Each work site also conducts its own training in addition to the activities listed here.

Kioxia Group in Japan strives to minimize the number of workplace accidents and monitor any occurrences. We use the “frequency of injuries resulting in lost working days” as an indicator for these efforts. In 2022, the frequency rate was 0.08, which was below the average rate of 0.53 in the electrical machinery and equipment manufacturing industries.

Kioxia Group in Japan will continue to implement further measures to prevent workplace accidents. In particular, we will prioritize the reduction of hazardous risks that could lead to illness or serious injury and conduct risk assessments of all workplaces and tasks. In addition, we systematically manage and reduce risks by reviewing work methods from risk identification to elimination, renovating facilities, and providing education and training to employees. 

As the environment in which the Kioxia Group conducts business continues to change dramatically, we have been working on the implementation of health and safety measures for our employees, an investment which we see as essential for the future of our company and the development of society (health investment).

Kioxia Holdings Corporation issued the Kioxia Group Health Management Declaration in April 2023.

The President and CEO of Kioxia Holdings Corporation and Kioxia Corporation has ultimate responsibility for the promotion of health and safety management. In 2023, Kioxia Corporation reorganized its approach in this area, allowing each level of the company to have a role promoting employee health, as shown in the diagram below.⁴

With the Health and Safety Section of the company's Human Resources and Administrative Division as the secretariat, activities, measures and policies are discussed at regular meetings with the Health Support Center, which deploys industrial physicians and public health nurses at each of our sites. In addition, our management is committed to focusing on health-related issues, with the company, labor union, and health insurance union working together to promote healthy activities and lifestyles.

In the future, we will expand our health management initiatives to other group companies.

⁴ Currently at Kioxia Corporation, the President and CEO also promotes health management at Kioxia Holdings Corporation.

We pursue the following initiatives to create an environment where employees can work in good mental and physical health. Each business site also proactively implements its own measures.
 

• We have established processes whereby physicians are deployed to comment on the results of medical checkups covering lifestyle-related diseases such as high blood pressure and high blood sugar levels, allowing for intervention by the physicians and consultation with public health nurses. In this way we aim to reduce the number of employees who leave the company due to absenteeism, leave or illness.
• We have set up a mental health consultation service and make its existence known to all employees. We also provide various training programs aimed at preventing stress-related illnesses.
• We are promoting collaborative health programs⁷ with health insurance societies to improve employees' health literacy and to prevent and alleviate metabolic syndrome.

⁸ This covers Kioxia Holdings Corporation and Kioxia Corporation.
⁹ Situation in which an employee is on sick leave, calculated as the percentage of employees who took 8 or more days of leave due to illness or health reasons (from April 2022 to March 2023).
¹⁰ Situation in which an employee attends work but is unable to perform at full capacity due to health problems. Data is compiled based on self-assessments of work performance over the prior four weeks.

For other health and safety performance statistics, please see below.