JFE Holdings (TSE: 5411) told the Tokyo Stock Exchange on August 5 that it now expects revenue of ¥2.38tn, business profit of ¥90.0bn, pretax profit of ¥85.0bn and profit attributable to owners of the parent of ¥65.0bn for the six months to the end of September, with basic earnings per share guided at ¥102.18. None of those figures existed in the plan JFE published on May 8: the company had left the first-half line undecided and said only that a forecast would follow once one was available. The new guide would be more than double the ¥26.7bn JFE earned over the same six months a year earlier.
The comparison looks steep across every headline line.
| Metric | New H1 Forecast | Prior-Year H1 Actual |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | ¥2.38tn | ¥2.23tn |
| Business profit | ¥90.0bn | ¥45.8bn |
| Pretax profit | ¥85.0bn | ¥34.2bn |
| Attributable profit | ¥65.0bn | ¥26.7bn |
| Basic EPS | ¥102.18 | ¥41.94 |
JFE's board also fixed the split of the ¥80-a-share annual dividend it had already flagged: ¥40 at the interim mark and ¥40 at year-end, unchanged from last year's payout and consistent with the payout policy under its eighth medium-term plan. The full-year targets behind that dividend, ¥150.0bn in net profit on ¥4.85tn of revenue, were left unchanged from the outlook JFE gave alongside its first-quarter results.
The building blocks for the new guide showed up in the quarter to June 30, when JFE reported business profit of ¥32.3bn, nearly double the year-earlier figure, on revenue of ¥1.16tn. Profit attributable to owners of the parent, at ¥31.2bn, was more than four times higher, helped in part by a ¥15.0bn gain from a separate land sale. JFE says it is absorbing about ¥60.0bn of extra costs this year tied to Middle East tensions, of which ¥15.0bn hit the first quarter, and is countering that with steel-price increases: a ¥10,000-per-tonne rise achieved in the first half and a further ¥5,000-per-tonne rise it is targeting.
On the same day, JFE Steel signed a contract to sell about 182,000 square metres of a disused raw-material yard at its Keihin works in Kawasaki, part of a broader plan to convert the waterfront site into a next-generation logistics hub. JFE expects total gains of roughly ¥45.0bn from the sale, split across four transfers running from the year ending March 2028 through the year ending March 2036, with about ¥23.0bn landing in the first tranche. The buyer remains undisclosed - JFE says only that it is a domestic company with no capital, personnel or trading ties to JFE - and the two sides plan a detailed release and a joint press conference from late August onward.
That land sale is separate from the ¥15.0bn gain already booked in the June quarter, and neither is embedded in the newly disclosed first-half profit line, which JFE attributes to steel-segment recovery and contributions from its Indian operations rather than one-off property sales.