Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only, not investment advice. I may own equities mentioned in this article. Investing involves risk, so always do your own research before buying or selling any securities.
During Japan’s never ending rainy season (longest consecutive rain in Tokyo history of 34 days as we speak), I spent a lot of time talking about Japanese stocks with Swedish investors, the deep value kind who treat Warren Buffett like a good and listen to value investing podcasts (like my favorite: Kvalitetsaktiepodden (KAP)) the way other people listen to true crime.
When I sent around my screener of 127 of Japan’s deepest value stocks right now, there was one name everyone came back to.
That my friends, is Fukui Computer, a CAD software company from Fukui Prefecture that almost nobody outside the Japanese construction industry has heard of, and to be honest most people in Tokyo haven’t either.
The reason my Swedish investor friends got interested in this are the incredible numbers (which I’ll get back to later), but the timing is what makes this company interesting right now. If you remember, in February the so-called SaaSpocalypse knocked something like $1 trillion off software stocks in a single week because the market decided AI agents are going to eat every piece of subscription software on the planet, and Tokyo joined in on February 4 with Sansan down 14% and the accounting software firm Freee down 13% in one session. So you have a market that hates software, and then you have a Japanese software company that makes 43.6% operating margins selling the programs builders and surveyors need to get their drawings accepted by the government. That’s a perfect storm!
