In FY2025, net sales grew 24.4% year on year, and adjusted operating profit* rose 137.0%, an all-time high. Our adjusted operating profit margin also reached 15.7% and our earnings structure improved steadily. Measured against the medium-term financial policy we announced in July 2024, we landed just where we expected to.
Building on this progress, we announced a new medium-term financial policy covering FY2026–2028, under which we’re targeting a three-year net sales compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16–20% and an adjusted operating profit margin of 25–30% for FY2028.
We now operate several businesses at different growth stages. Sansan has achieved stable net sales growth and high profitability, evolving into the Group’s profit base. Eight has turned profitable for two consecutive fiscal years and Bill One, while continuing its high growth, is expected to reach full-year profitability in FY2026. Our free cash flow** also expanded to 10.0 billion yen in FY2025, and I expect our cash-generating power to keep increasing as profit growth continues. Given all this, I see our current business portfolio as having a good balance of growth and profitability.
With this stronger financial foundation in place, our policy on capital allocation is to continuously balance growth investment and shareholder returns, while maintaining the financial flexibility to respond agilely to growth opportunities. Yet within that, we continue to prioritize business expansion above all else. We will keep investing in both existing and new businesses, and we will actively pursue strategic M&A as a lever for accelerating our growth strategy.
In 2026, we delivered full-scale shareholder returns for the first time. Spanning the end of FY2025 and the start of FY2026, we conducted a share buyback with a total acquisition value of approximately 2.0 billion yen. We also paid our first-ever dividend since our founding, bringing our total payout ratio, combining the two, to over 30%. While continuing to prioritize business expansion above all else, we will keep providing shareholder returns.
We are pursuing initiatives on two fronts to sustainably increase corporate value: improving return on capital and obtaining appropriate recognition. Our return on equity (ROE) for FY2025 came to 38.8% and we will continue to improve our return on capital through profit growth and appropriate capital allocation. For obtaining appropriate recognition, both reducing the cost of capital and raising our expected growth rate are important. We will work to reduce our cost of capital by building up a track record of delivering on our earnings forecasts and strengthening the capital markets’ trust in us. We also aim to raise our expected growth rate by realizing as many of the AI-driven business opportunities, M&A deals, and other initiatives not built into our medium-term financial policy as we can, and showing them in our actual results.
Going forward, we will continue to balance growth and profitability as we aim for sustained growth in corporate value.
September 2026
Muneyuki Hashimoto
Director, Executive Officer, CFO
* Adjusted operating profit: Operating profit + Share-based payment expenses + Expenses arising from business combinations (amortization of goodwill and amortization of intangible assets)
** Cash flows from operating activities – (Capital expenditures for property, plant and equipment + Capital expenditures for intangible assets). Note that cash flows from operating activities are adjusted for the impact of temporary fund movements related to the
acquisition of treasury stock.
