Revenue is on plan, but achieving full-year operating profit will require a sharp recovery in the fourth quarter

Cumulative revenue for the first 3 quarters was ¥368.901 million, representing 75.5% of the full-year forecast of ¥488.887 million. This was 0.5 percentage points above the simple time-based progress rate of 75% after 9 months, so revenue can be assessed as broadly on plan, as the company explains. Operating profit, meanwhile, was only ¥2.472 million, representing 8.0% of the full-year forecast of ¥30.331 million. The substantial difference in progress against plan between revenue and profit will be the key point to verify in the FY2026 results.

Meeting the full-year forecast mechanically will require revenue of ¥119.986 million and operating profit of ¥27.859 million in the fourth quarter. This would mean generating 91.8% of the full-year operating profit forecast in the fourth quarter alone, implying an operating margin of approximately 23.2% on the remaining revenue. Since the cumulative operating margin for the first 3 quarters was only approximately 0.7%, the company needs to verify on a monetary basis whether the monetisation of stock-based tie-up projects and normalisation of expenses will materialise as expected, rather than attributing the improvement simply to seasonality.

The third-quarter results presentation gave full-year forecasts of ¥488.887 million in revenue, ¥30.331 million in operating profit, ¥17.000 million in ordinary profit and ¥15.000 million in net profit, with no revisions from the previous forecasts. It would be premature to judge whether the forecasts will be achieved solely because revenue is on plan. The disclosure does not specify the project scale, revenue recognition timing or reductions in cost of sales and SG&A needed to offset the low operating profit progress.

At the next full-year results announcement, we will check not only whether revenue reached at least ¥488.887 million, but also whether operating profit reached ¥30.331 million. If the target is missed, we will examine the amount of revenue recognised from stock-based tie-ups, the contributions from the platform and media advertising businesses, and how much investment-phase spending remained, to determine whether the pattern of higher revenue but low profitability, in which only revenue meets plan, is continuing.