Marubeni is spending more on both investment and shareholder returns after a quarter that ran well ahead of its own targets. The trading house said net profit attributable to owners for the three months to June 2026 rose 20.7% year-on-year to ¥186.4bn, putting it 32.1% of the way to its unchanged full-year forecast of ¥580bn just one quarter in.
Revenue climbed 20.6% to ¥2.61tn and operating profit, a Japanese-accounting figure the company reports alongside IFRS measures for investor convenience, rose 54.7% to ¥132.1bn. Basic earnings per share reached ¥114.19, up from ¥93.42 a year earlier.
| Metric | Apr-Jun 2025 | Apr-Jun 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | ¥2.16tn | ¥2.61tn |
| Operating profit | ¥85.4bn | ¥132.1bn |
| Net profit attributable to owners | ¥154.4bn | ¥186.4bn |
| Basic earnings per share | ¥93.42 | ¥114.19 |
The gains were concentrated in commodities. Metals segment profit rose to ¥42.0bn, up ¥13.2bn, on higher prices flowing through Marubeni's Chilean copper and Australian coking-coal businesses. Energy & Chemicals profit rose to ¥25.8bn, up ¥17.0bn, on stronger petrochemical trading and North American natural gas trading.
Off the back of that performance, Marubeni revised the capital-allocation plan under its GC2027 mid-term strategy, first published in February 2025. It added ¥250bn to the new-investment and capital-expenditure envelope, taking the three-year total to ¥1.95tn from ¥1.7tn, and raised its cumulative shareholder-return target from ¥700bn to ¥900bn. The company said it will manage leverage flexibly, keeping credit ratings in mind, rather than insisting on staying free-cash-flow positive after returns in every period.
The near-term piece of that return plan is a share buyback of up to ¥100bn, covering as many as 40 million shares, or roughly 2.5% of shares outstanding, running from August 4, 2026 through March 31, 2027. The full-year dividend forecast stays at ¥115.00 per share (¥57.50 interim, ¥57.50 year-end), up from ¥107.50 paid out the prior year. Net interest-bearing debt rose ¥191.8bn to ¥2.05tn as the company funded the buyback and dividends, pushing its net debt-to-equity ratio to 0.46 times from 0.43 times.
The filing itself was procedural: Marubeni disclosed on August 5, 2026 that its auditor, EY, had completed its interim review of the quarterly consolidated statements first released on August 3, 2026, with no changes to the figures already published. The substance sits in the underlying numbers and the capital-allocation shift, not in the review's completion.