Jeez, Japanese markets seem happy.
Everything from Furukawa, Towa, Harmonic Drive, Ibiden, are up today.
Probably after winning the World Cup game 4-0?
Trump administration is prob realizing now that the key to winning Trade Wars:
Is through frontier supply chains like Quantum, AI, Robotics.
Not cheap Nike sock exports.
With $ASML, $TOWA, $LPK, Ajinomoto,
over in Japan, EU, TW, Korea, and others holding all the cards…
Since each country holds different monopolies and chokepoints needed to make each industry work.
Which all happens to be OUTSIDE the US.
Tariffing all our partners turned out to be not a great idea.
But not too late imo to repair relations and weaponize global supply chains through partners if Trump wants better trade deals.
For Towa (6315):
Earnings are very nuanced. I got the current ER "Beat" wrong in my original thesis (short term), my bad.
But it's an amazing structural long and setup for H2 2026 rather than H1.
TLDR: Near term bearish algorithmically since they miss the nuance, very positive H2 (markets are forward looking)
Revenue ¥54.36B (+1.7% YoY),
Net Profit at ¥4.59B (-43.4% YoY).
Operating Profit ¥6.91B (-22.1% YoY)
News headlines say "EPS crashed -43.4%" or "order miss" that might trigger an algorithmic selloff.
1. As you've seen with US Towa trading, "EPS crashing -43.4%", and algos might have sold headlines.
-> But this was due to last year, of one-off "compensation for damage" payout and one-time ¥1.3 billion yen stock sales from last year.
-> Also "increased initial costs for new customers in compression equipment." for new equipment is caused profitability losses this quarter.
So a bit of an accounting mirage, not really any profitability issues + scaling new orders, so one-off.
However:
Margin inflection point is already here. Which is the biggest signal.
Full year operating margin was 12.7%. For the annual average to reach 12.7% when Q1-Q3 was hovering around ~10%, Q4 should have been around ~18.4% or something?
Which is extremely bullish moving forward for profitability, and shows HBM compression machines are doing work, compared to legacy equipment.
2. Order book "miss":
"Acceleration expected during the second half of fiscal year 3/27 as front-end process production capacity expands."
This signals $MU, Sk Hynix, and others don't have the floor space ready yet, since they're still building front-end wafer fab lines.
But H2, is setup for massive beat. Demand visibility is there... just revenue/profit ramp deferred to H2.
_
Towa forward guidance forcasted ¥64.0B in Sales (+17.7% YoY) and ¥10.24B in Operating Profit (+48.0% YoY), which signals all time high profitability in the future.
IMO they also sandbagged revenue guidance, since they literally said acceleration second-half but didn't give much of a projection beat.
Japanese companies tend to be ultra conservative too, their dividend hike is a large signal too
Regardless, I think the US selloff was probably just due to negative accounting headlines + lower liquidity. Also I was a bit too early by like 4-6 months.
But Towa is an extremely positive setup for H2. Just not your explosive $SNDK $AAOI 10%+ a day type company.
TLDR: Long term bullish, short term lot of nuances missed with headlines.
Just need to wait a few more months if you have patience. Margins are increasing, revenue/orders deferred H2, dividend hikes, etc.