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ASICS Clears ¥1tn, Advance Create Clears Its Conscience (Five Years Late)
ASICS just guided to ¥1tn in sales and spun off Onitsuka Tiger, while five years of Advance Create's books quietly got rewritten. Tokyo's earnings season cuts both ways today.
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Market pulse
Tokyo equities advanced while the 10Y JGB yield nudged higher.
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The Lead
ASICS Tops ¥1tn Sales Outlook, Raises Dividend, Preps Onitsuka Tiger Spin-off
ASICS Raises the Bar to ¥1.05tn, Preps Onitsuka Tiger Spin-off ASICS booked its strongest first half on record and immediately raised the bar for the rest of the year. Sales for the six months to June rose 32.7% to ¥534.5bn, the first time the sportswear maker has cleared ¥500bn in a half, while operating profit jumped 48.5% to ¥120.5bn and the operating margin hit 22.5%. Net profit attributable to shareholders climbed 53.3% to ¥82.2bn, comfortably ahead of the ¥53.6bn it earned in the same stretch last year.
What changed: Management used the momentum to raise full-year revenue guidance to ¥1.05tn and lift the annual dividend to ¥44 a share. What's next: ASICS confirmed Onitsuka Tiger will separate into a standalone company from January 2027, formalizing years of speculation that the retro sneaker line had outgrown its role as a division.
The catch: A company running this hot rarely keeps raising guidance forever, and the spin-off means ASICS' own numbers will look different well before the ink dries on its next full set of results.
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Deal Watch
Kakaku.com Buyout Price Climbs to ¥3,570 as Bain Capital-Backed Rival Bid Forces Second Increase
Kamgras 1, the vehicle trying to take Kakaku.com private, raised its tender offer a second time in three months, lifting the price to ¥3,570 a share from ¥3,450 on August 13 and pushing the tender period back to August 27, 2026 — a run now stretching 75 business days.
Why it matters: The increase followed a competing proposal from funds advised by Bain Capital and LINE Yahoo of as much as ¥3,640 a share, contingent on KDDI's agreement, turning what looked like a routine going-private deal into a live bidding contest for a TSE Prime price-comparison operator.
What to watch: Kakaku.com's board recommendation has not changed even as the price has moved twice, leaving shareholders to weigh a live competing bid against a deal that keeps getting sweetened rather than settled.
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Capital Returns
SMFG Hits 100% of Its ¥180bn Buyback Ceiling, Leaving 30% of Share Quota Unused
Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group has spent virtually all of the cash its board budgeted for its latest buyback, ¥179.99bn through July 31, exhausting 100% of its ¥180bn ceiling while using only 70% of the accompanying 40 million-share cap set alongside it.
Why it matters: The gap between the two limits shows SMFG paid up for its own stock rather than waiting for a cheaper entry point, a sign of how much of its capital-return commitment it wanted to bank before the program's window closes.
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Earnings That Matter
Idemitsu's Quarterly Profit Jumps Sevenfold on an Oil-Price Timing Effect
Idemitsu Kosan's net profit for the three months to June came to ¥217.5bn, up 696% from ¥27.3bn a year earlier, as revenue rose 23.8% to ¥2.27tn and operating profit swung to ¥307.5bn from an operating loss of ¥4.0bn.
The catch: The jump reflects a timing lag between when Idemitsu buys crude and when it sells refined product, not a structural improvement in refining margins, and the company left its full-year guidance untouched even after confirming the numbers with no changes from its August 7 disclosure.
Nexon's First-Half Profit More Than Doubles on ARC Raiders and MapleStory Growth
Nexon's net profit for the six months to June rose to ¥86.9bn, up 102% and already close to all of 2025's total, as ARC Raiders and a refreshed MapleStory line-up outweighed a sliding Dungeon&Fighter franchise.
GMO Payment Gateway's In-Store Terminals Outrun Its Online Business
Online transaction growth cooled to 1.4% once a merchant shifted its processing in-house, but face-to-face volume rose 19% and a 40.5% jump in overseas fintech lending profit kept GMO Payment Gateway at 77% of its full-year operating-profit target.
Ebara's AI-Driven Chip Equipment Orders Jump 89% to a Record First Half
Ebara's order intake for chip-manufacturing equipment jumped 89.3% in the six months to June, pushing the group's total order book to a record ¥636.3bn and giving one of Japan's clearest readings yet on how far AI-driven capital spending has spread into equipment suppliers.
The catch: Operating profit rose just 1.2% because a swing to a loss in Ebara's energy business ate up nearly all of the gain from the chip-equipment side.
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Accounting Reckonings
Advance Create Rewrites Five Years of Results After Accounting Probe
Osaka insurance broker Advance Create has restated results for five straight fiscal years after a third-party panel found improper accounting in advertising bookings and software capitalization, a correction that pushed net worth to negative ¥6.56bn at one point before a preferred-share issue tied to SBI Holdings restored positive equity by September 2025.
Chipmaker J.E.T. Given One Year to Clear Tokyo Exchange Review or Risk Delisting
Tokyo Stock Exchange has given semiconductor-equipment maker J.E.T. until June 2027 to pass a re-examination after past accounting irregularities and a broken listing pledge, on top of a ¥28.8mn penalty and a ¥488mn restatement cleanup bill that helped push its half-year net loss to ¥1.06bn.
quick hits
More to Know
Oasis Raises Ain Holdings Stake to 20.93%, Reserves Room to Buy More
Read moreOasis Management's stake in Ain Holdings climbed to 20.93% from 19.80% on ¥38.98bn of fund capital, and the Cayman Islands firm has reserved the right to add more than five further percentage points if it judges the shares cheap enough.
Tokyo Electron Has Burned Through 80% of Its ¥150bn Buyback Budget in Two Months
Read moreTokyo Electron has used 80.37% of its ¥150bn buyback budget but only 25.40% of the authorized share count two months into a program that runs to March 2027, its July repurchase filing shows.
Dentsu's Return to Profit Leans on an Office Sale, Not a Demand Rebound
Read moreDentsu Group swung to a ¥46.3bn first-half net profit largely because it sold a Ginza-area office building and avoided repeating last year's ¥86.6bn impairment, not because advertising demand recovered: organic gross-profit growth was just 0.3%, propped up entirely by a 5.0% gain in Japan against declines in the Americas, EMEA and APAC.
Asahi's Profit Surge Owes More to the Yen and a One-Off Sale Than to Beer
Read moreAsahi Group Holdings reported a 69% rise in first-half net profit and a 56% jump in operating profit, but core business profit fell 8.5% once currency effects are stripped out, and its Japan and East Asia unit is still absorbing the fallout from a September 2025 cyberattack.
Trend Micro's AI Bill Erases Much of Its Sales Growth
Read moreTrend Micro's first-half sales rose 11% to ¥148.6bn, but AI token, cloud and yen-inflated payroll costs pushed total expenses up 20%, cutting operating profit by nearly a quarter even as its closely watched recurring-revenue metric grew a slower 5% once currency effects are stripped out.
China Puts Drone Maker ACSL on Its Export Watch List Just as US Curbs Fuel Its American Sales
Read moreACSL's half-year filing shows North American drone sales rising to ¥1.02bn from ¥42.7mn a year earlier as US bans on Chinese-made drones lift its NDAA-compliant SOTEN, even as China's Ministry of Commerce placed the Tokyo firm on a watch list in June that tightens export screening for the dual-use parts it still sources from China.
RIZAP Group Swings to First Quarterly Profit in Five Years
Read moreRIZAP Group posted a ¥135 million net profit for the quarter to June 2026, its first first-quarter profit in five years, while still committing roughly ¥15 billion this year to expanding its chocoZAP gym chain.
FAN Communications Pulls 2026 Guidance as AI Search Summaries Erode Affiliate Traffic
Read moreFirst-half profit fell 71% at the Tokyo affiliate-ad network, pushing it to scrap this year's earnings forecast and the three-year growth plan it launched in early 2025; management points to AI-generated search summaries diverting clicks from its affiliate partner sites.
Itochu Buys Into Bookoff as Reuse Chain's Profit Beats Its Own Guidance by a Quarter
Read moreItochu Corporation now holds a 5% stake in the used-goods retailer under a February alliance, and Bookoff's profit for the year to May 2026 came in 25.6% above the guidance it issued last July.
Okinawa Financial Group's Profit Jumps 41% as Lending Yields Climb
Read moreBank of Okinawa pushed its loan yield to 1.81% and rode strong local credit demand, lifting parent Okinawa Financial Group's quarterly net profit 41% to ¥3.61bn, even as deposit funding costs nearly doubled.
Rigaku's Profit Halves as US Lab Sales Slow, Even as Onto Innovation Takes a Board Seat
Read moreOperating profit fell by more than half at Japanese X-ray instrument maker Rigaku Holdings in the six months to June, dragged down by weaker lab-equipment sales tied to US trade friction and energy costs rather than academic-funding cuts alone. Chipmaking tools kept growing on memory and logic demand, and Carlyle has sold its Rigaku stake to US metrology firm Onto Innovation, which gets a board seat and a joint hybrid-metrology push aimed at advanced AI chips.
Jimoty's Profit Climbs as New Owner Culture Convenience Club Sets Up a Delisting Vote
Read moreA completed tender offer has handed Culture Convenience Club control of Jimoty, and an August 28 shareholder vote on share consolidation is the remaining step before the classifieds operator leaves the Tokyo Stock Exchange, even as its ad business and reuse-hub franchise both grew through June 2026.