Yesterday, February 29^th is a date that only comes around every four years on a leap year and it turned out to be a great day for me personally and for AGRIBUDDY.

First, for AGRIBUDDY.

Since AGRIBUDDY’s concept was to link the local farmers in developing countries to the related businesses online to solve the various problems surrounding the current agricultural industry. It started as a small project in our company and in November 2014 we released the βversion, in January 2015 we officially spun off from the internal project and decided to proceed with corporate registration. We released the official version in April 2015, that was the flow of building our service.

Talking about “developing countries” and “agriculture” in one word is nonsense because the efforts of each country’s government and the situation of each farmers vary. But since Cambodia has so many issues and they are complexly intertwined, we felt that if we could build a service in Cambodia, we would be able to provide highly versatile services that work in other countries where the situation seems to be a little better off. With such thoughts on our minds, we started in a small province in Cambodia and improved our services through trial and error, now we are ready to expand our services to the nation and other neighboring countries such as Thailand and Vietnam, or even to South Asian countries such as Bangladesh and India.

So, in order to take this leap to the next big step, we need to realize our big goal of changing the way of agriculture in the world through the “formulation of dense and bold strategy” and “to build a strong organization”, we encountered some encouraging and wise partners with plenty of experience and strength to support us. One of them being Mr. Makoto Haruta who was a startup CFO at DeNA, grew the company to a billion-yen corporation and drew attention by acquiring and operating a professional baseball team (Yokohama DeNA BayStars) while he was the president. Another friend of his who is the ex-COO of AOL platforms Japan, Mr. Hisashige Hashimoto of Betacatalyst (http://betacatalyst.jp/) has agreed to accept the third-party allocation of shares and we signed the deals with them yesterday, on February 29^th.

With Mr. Haruta and Mr. Hashimoto joining us, team AGRIBUDDY is focusing more than ever and making efforts to achieve our goals. I would like to thank Mr. Nozu of Donuts (http://www.donuts.ne.jp/) who introduced them to me in Hanoi, I really appreciate the fate that connected us.

In my personal life, my daughter was born two weeks earlier than expected. It would have been a great story if she was born on the 29^th, since she would only have a birthday once every four years, and that would also prove my DNA of “news material”, but I think she decided to fight against that and was born 10 minutes after the date changed to March 1^st . looks like she already has the ability to detect crisis…

So, here it is. A new stage has begun for my company and as an individual.

That’s why a new stage began as a company as an individual. Everyone, please continue your continued support and advice. Much gratitude for the continuous support and advice from everyone. Thank you.