Since @MikeFritzell mentioned.. JEH has gone through a lot of unnecessary Drama lately but they took it on the chin and handled it well. Company Q4 results were a banger. Q4 revenue: 19% EBITDA: 31% (Margin 40.5%!) Company continues to exhibit incredible pricing power in line with their strategy. I continue to like this name as a unique expression of the Japan opportunity! Guidance was the wildcard given the new factory but looks like they'll continue to deliver mid-teens growth - which is in line with my expectations. Continues to be a 'long term earnings compounder' type biz for me. Insanely strong inbound tourism may be potential upside?? Valuation gap vs EssilorLuxoticca also still huge. Despite that I think JEH is still early. JEH : 8.7x $EL: 17.8x And you know which products I prefer!! Disc; Long

An interesting business that started running up in the last years is Meiko Electronics $6787.JP . A top manufacturer of Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) in Japan. They also make semiconductor package substrates where they are one of the few in the world to be able to mass produce high density substrates. End market is pretty diversified but they've recently seen an accelerated contribution from a 'satellite communication customer' which the company doesn't confirm but is widely believed to be Starlink. Pretty cool that you can get exposure in things like that in the public markets if you know where to look (I didn't lol). Japan houses many such component manufacturers. Some potentially to crucial tech in the world. PER 14.8x and EBITDA 9.3x

New write up! A few days ago I wrote about my new long position Ebrains. Trades at 3x EBIT. - sells mission critical products - high switching costs, many are customers for decades - the # of players that can do this have reduced significantly over the last decade - exposed to key sectors for 🇯🇵 and is set to accelerate - as a result theres operating leverage potential mix improvements - 60% of market cap in cash - their IR deck looks like it was made 20 years ago (🔥) - under the radar and no english IR. Their english website was last updated in… 2003! What I liked is that it’s set to benefit from not just 1 but 3 major sectors: semis, defense and power. due to it’s position in the supply chain, the huge capex into semis hasn’t shown up yet on the PnL but my bet and the main catalyst is that its going to accelerate in a 12 month time frame. I guess one comp in the US is nVent $nvt though this is much smaller. TLDR: If you sell mission critical products to 3 industries seeing major tailwinds and your customer base looks like this, i’m not sure 0.9x book or <5x FCF makes sense. Find it in the usual place. This is not a recommendation, please do your own due diligence!

Fascinating that the radio is the third fastest technology in history to reach 50% penetration It spread faster than the internet (only AI and the smartphone beat it) But the dishwasher took 47 years I loved Alex's analogy for the two models of adoption, the radio and the dishwasher: "We commissioned Horace Dediu, who used to work with Clayton Christensen, to go look at S-curves over the last 100 years. The radio S-curve is one of the fastest ever. But the dishwasher S-curve is the opposite, because it needs to be plugged into the back end. B2B stuff can take a long time, because it needs to be plugged into the existing systems. Consumers generally tend to go a lot faster. I covered B2B internet at Fidelity. The underlying infrastructure wasn't in place for B2B to happen. It ultimately happened 20 years later, with SaaS. That is a risk with AI, in that these big companies are very security-conscious and can be slow to move. There are a lot of cultural issues with AI, where you really need a few evangelists to push it through. The top management needs to push it through, but then IT is saying this is risky. And that happened with cloud too. Everybody was afraid that it's not secure to have your data in the cloud. And then we saw the CIA do it, and we saw Capital One. We talked to the Capital One CIO, who said it's more secure in the cloud. And then it really started to take off. But what's amazing about AI is that you just open up the browser and it's there. And so that's why we're getting this straight up, we call it the backwards L-curve."

決済・金融プラットフォームなど「Stripe」日本法人 ストライプジャパン 決算公告（第12期） kanpo-kanpo.blog.jp/archives… 第12期 決算公告 売上高：495億6707万円 売上総利益：59億2768万円 営業利益：9億8490万円 経常利益：6億4080万円 純利益：3億4869万円 利益剰余金：11億575万円

But of course 💀💀💀

I don’t get how this store works. But I doubt Americans are ready for this particular type of retail experience

Kioxia has now become the company with the largest market capitalization in Japan.

Most of what I see on my timeline these days is AI or 🇯🇵 defense tech… I’d like to personally take credit for the 🇯🇵 defense tech wave, thank you very much 🤣 In all seriousness, exciting to see & necessary. Think there’s a lot more oppty & upside beyond the “tech” tho

I guess everyone is starting to see this but at least for the fund managers around me focused on Japan, quite consistently there's been a divergence in performance between those that are betting on AI and those that are not in recent months. It's starting to remind me of 2024 where all the money and attention went to large cap value and some of the cheap growth names were left by the way side. It's not just institutions but retail which are the main constituents of small/micro caps that drove this. Feels similar where all the attention/flows are going to AI at the moment. All the money/attention from retail are also moving to this theme. At least in years past, such trades in Japan can get crowded fast. I also continue to have exposure into AI but increasingly more cautious, There are quite some non AI/Semi companies that are growing fast trading at single digit earnings, some even improving shareholder returns that's simply not getting as much attention.