Fuji Die, Japan's top maker of tungsten carbide wear-resistant tools and dies, has cut its full-year sales forecast by 6.2% to ¥24.4bn even as it raises its profit outlook, a split that traces directly to a Chinese export freeze on tungsten now in its tenth month.
Since November 2025, Beijing has issued no export permits for tungsten shipments to Japan, and supply from domestic raw-material makers has fallen to 70-80% of 2025 levels, the Tokyo-listed toolmaker said in its results supplement. The squeeze has driven up the benchmark price for ammonium paratungstate (APT), the intermediate material Fuji Die uses to track tungsten costs: from $300 per 10kg before Beijing tightened export controls to $3,000 per 10kg by April 2026, a tenfold jump the company expects to persist given tight supply and demand.
For the quarter ended June 2026, Fuji Die reported revenue of ¥5,051mn, up 22.4% from a year earlier, and operating profit of ¥618mn, up 252.4%. Management revised its full-year guidance, first flagged August 7, in two directions at once.
| Metric | Previous Forecast | Revised Forecast | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales | ¥26.0bn | ¥24.4bn | -6.2% |
| Operating profit | ¥700mn | ¥840mn | +20.0% |
| Net profit attributable to owners | ¥520mn | ¥620mn | +19.2% |
Sales are now expected to fall short of the earlier full-year outlook because domestic customers are cutting order volumes faster than expected as Fuji Die passes tungsten costs through to prices, while overseas markets have absorbed the price increases and kept growing. Operating profit guidance rose because the company's weighted-average inventory-costing method has cushioned the first quarter's exposure to higher input costs, and because efficient use of recycled raw material has kept the cost impact below initial expectations. Management cautioned that the cushion will fade in the second half, when the tungsten cost increase works its way more fully into production costs, so second-half profit is expected to come in below the first-half pace.
The company has also temporarily suspended taking new orders for copper-tungsten alloy, one of its specialty product lines, citing the supply constraint. On June 26 it signed a business tie-up with a Japanese industrial-alloy maker to cross-sell alloys engineered around the shortage: one alloy, marketed as STN30, cuts tungsten and cobalt content by 90% for rotary and kneading tools, and another is a tungsten- and cobalt-free material for dies and heat-resistant jigs. Separately, Fuji Die is folding its overseas business division into a single sales headquarters from October 1, consolidating domestic and international sales information to make more effective use of scarce raw material and pursue a global sales strategy.
The dividend plan is unchanged at ¥40 per share for the year to March 2027, tied to a dividend-on-equity target the company raised to 4%. Guidance assumes an APT price of $3,058 per 10kg and an exchange rate of ¥160 to the dollar, both of which the company flagged as sources of uncertainty.
Separately on August 31, Fuji Die filed a correction to the same results supplement, fixing a swapped chairman-and-president listing on the company-overview page. The company said no numerical data were affected.