Weathernews Inc. Acquires Metnext Entering Environmental Weather Market

Expanding Weathernews services to worldwide energy, retail, and agriculture markets

CHIBA, Japan--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Weathernews Inc. (Chiba, Japan; Chihito Kusabiraki/CEO; “Weathernews”) (TOKYO:4825) announced that it had completed the acquisition of all shares of Mextnet SA (Paris, France; Patrice Massat/CEO; “Metnext”), and that the company had become its wholly-owned subsidiary today. Metnext is a European leader in providing weather based analytics services and decision making tools to help companies manage their activities at best leveraging climate impact. Through the acquisition, the companies will share their service know-how and infrastructure, and combining their technology and expertise in an effort to develop new services for customers in Asia, Europe, and other areas of the world.

The Background and Purpose of the Acquisition

Since its founding in 1986, Weathernews has provided weather risk management support services mainly for the global transportation weather markets (shipping, aviation, railway and road transportation). Furthermore, the company is targeting energy, factory, retail and agriculture markets as “environmental weather markets” for 2017 and will engage in developing and offering its services globally. Metnext provides services leveraging its own software solutions and technology to the various sectors of the “environmental weather markets” such as : Energy: energy production for gas, wind , solar, hydro; Retail, Industry, Services: demand forecast to adjust production and logistics; Agribusiness: delivery of high precision field based observations and forecast to anticipate agri treatment. With the aim of providing high-quality services to the global transportation and environmental weather markets, the two companies will join their strengths to generate the following synergies:

• Combining Weathernews’ strengths in mitigation and avoidance of everyday operational weather risks with Metnext’s technology and services for project design, operational planning and post-project evaluation based on weather risks will enable the provision of total support for corporate activities from the design and planning phase to everyday operation and maintenance, dealing with emergencies and post-project evaluation.
• Metnext’s Paris Office will serve as the base to strengthen marketing, service development and operations, enabling the ability to work with new partners to accelerate expansion in Europe.
• By coordinating their data and service operations, they will work to build global environmental meteorology services, in addition to expanding globally and improving service quality in the same way as transportation weather.

Overview of Environmental Weather Services
	Energy Market
		ⅰ.	Predictive Demand Control
			・Gas and Electricity
		ⅱ.	Predictive Generation Control
			・Solar Photovoltaic Power, Wind Power
		ⅲ.	Asset Management Control
			・Power Station, Grid Transformer
	Factory and Retail Market
		ⅰ.	Predictive Demand Control
		ⅱ.	Climate Impact Analysis and Prediction
		ⅲ.	Inventory Optimization Control
	Agriculture Market
		ⅰ.	Farming Management
			・Growth, Treatment and Harvesting Management

Comments from Weathernews and Metnext

Thomas Skov, Executive Officer of Sales in charge of European Sales, Weathernews Inc.
Weathernews is excited to go to market together with Metnext. This merger has been greatly anticipated and we are happy it would close a good year in which Weathernews Europe has laid out several long-term strategic goals. To achieve these goals we are investing in our future. The merger with Metnext is a result of our vision of being industries leading provider of secure, next generation software solutions, business forecasting and decision making tools in climate business intelligence technology. In this highly competitive market, we want to bring value for customers who are looking for the best-qualified, innovative and reliable partner. Together with Metnext we want to deliver high performance services and products, to mitigate the weather business risk most industries are facing today.

Patrice Massat, CEO of Metnext SA
This acquisition means that Metnext will receive Weathernews Inc. support to continue its development in Europe, will have access to Weathernews expertise, technologies and solutions in order to enlarge its service scope and allow its customer to benefit from it. It also means that Metnext will benefit from Weathernews presence in Asia, Europe and in the U.S. to better support its customers globally. We are convinced that this new partner will bring the technological, industrial and financial means allowing us to continuously improve the quality of services we provide on the long run.

Corporate Overview of Weathernews Inc.
Company name	Weathernews Inc.
Address	Nakase 1-3 Mihama-ku, Chiba-shi, Chiba, Japan
Founded	June 11, 1986
Capital stock	JPY 1,706 million
Name and title of representative	Chihito Kusabiraki, President and Representative Director
Number of employees	764
Business	Weather information consulting

Corporate Overview of Metnext SA
Company name	Metnext SA
Address	79 rue Faubourg Poissonière, 75009 Paris, France
Founded	April 16, 2007
Capital stock	2,851,400 EUR
Name and title of representative	Patrice de Paulou Massat, CEO
Number of employees	21
Business	Weather information consulting

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