How to Read a Kessan Tanshin: A Field Guide to Japanese Earnings Reports
The kessan tanshin (決算短信) is the fastest primary source in the Japanese market — and almost nobody outside Japan reads it directly. This guide explains where to find it, how the summary page is structured, and how Japanese investors actually use it. This is a research guide, not investment advice.
The short version
A kessan tanshin is an unaudited earnings flash report that Japanese listed companies release shortly after each quarter ends — well before the audited statutory filings. The first two pages contain most of what moves the stock: results, the company’s own full-year forecast, and the dividend forecast.
If you learn to read just the summary page and compare results against the company’s full-year forecast (the “progress rate”), you can follow Japanese earnings season without waiting for English summaries — and often before the market narrative settles.
What you will learn in this guide
This is a field guide, not an accounting course. The goal is that you can open a kessan tanshin PDF in Japanese and still extract the numbers that matter.
Where it lives
How TDnet, company IR pages, and EDINET divide the work — and which one to check first.
How page 1 is built
The summary page layout, the four profit levels, and why “ordinary profit” confuses foreign investors.
How locals read it
The progress-rate habit, conservative guidance culture, and the forecast-revision rules that create catalysts.
Where to find it: TDnet, company IR, EDINET
Japan splits disclosure across three places. Once you know the division of labor, finding documents is fast — even without reading Japanese.
Anatomy of page 1: the summary page
The first page of every kessan tanshin follows a standardized template defined by the exchange. That standardization is the reason this document is readable even if your Japanese is limited — the numbers are always in the same place.
Net sales Revenue for the period, with year-over-year percentage change printed next to it. The YoY column is your fastest orientation point on the whole page.
Operating profit Profit from the core business. For most research purposes this is the line Japanese individual investors care about most, because it is hardest to dress up with one-off items.
Ordinary profit Operating profit plus non-operating items such as interest, dividends received, and equity-method income. This line barely exists outside Japan and is the single biggest source of confusion for foreign readers. It is not “extraordinary” — recurring financial items live here.
Net profit Profit attributable to owners of the parent, after extraordinary gains and losses and taxes. Large gaps between operating and net profit are a signal to look for special items.
Full-year forecast The company’s own guidance for the full fiscal year — printed on page 1, updated when revised. Japanese companies publish numeric guidance as standard practice, which is why the progress-rate habit exists at all.
Dividend forecast Planned dividends per share, by interim and year-end. Dividend changes announced here frequently move the stock on the day.
The progress rate: how Japan actually reads earnings
This is the heart of the guide. In the US, results are judged against analyst consensus. In Japan, individual investors judge quarterly results primarily against the company’s own full-year forecast. The ratio is called the progress rate (進捗率).
The basic arithmetic
Cumulative profit ÷ full-year forecast. At the half-year point, roughly 50% is “on track” for a business without seasonality. Meaningfully above that raises the odds of an upward revision; meaningfully below it raises the odds of a downward one.
Seasonality is the trap
Many businesses earn most of their profit in specific quarters. Before judging a progress rate, compare it with the same company’s progress rate at the same point last year — not with a flat 25%-per-quarter model.
Check how the market reacted on TradingView
After reading a tanshin, I check the chart: did the stock gap on the release, did volume expand, and is the reaction holding? Reading the document tells you what changed; the chart tells you whether the market has noticed yet.
Visit TradingViewRed flags and quirks to know
The tanshin is standardized, but companies still have room to shape the story. These are the patterns worth slowing down for.
Special items
Extraordinary gains (asset sales, subsidy income) can inflate net profit while the core business stalls. Always compare the operating line with the net line before reacting to a “record profit” headline.
Unchanged guidance
“Forecast unchanged” is not neutral information. With a strong quarter it can mean conservatism; with a weak quarter it can mean management is delaying a downward revision. Context decides.
Segment shifts
The summary page hides segment detail. When the headline numbers and the story do not match, the answer is usually inside the segment table deeper in the PDF or in the presentation deck.
Using AI to read a tanshin you cannot read
The tanshin PDF is machine-readable text, which makes it ideal AI input. I upload the PDF to an AI assistant and force a structured output instead of a vague summary. A prompt like this works well:
Fact / Inference / Unknown
Every research note on this site separates information into three boxes. The tanshin feeds all three.
Fact
Numbers and statements printed in the tanshin, the presentation deck, or other official disclosures: results, forecasts, dividends, stated reasons for special items.
Inference
My interpretation: whether guidance looks conservative, whether a revision is likely, whether the market has already priced the change.
Unknown
What the document does not say: order timing, segment margins not disclosed, sustainability of one-off factors. Unknowns stay unknowns until a document answers them.
The 5-minute tanshin routine
With practice, one tanshin takes about five minutes. This is the order I read in.
Turn this reading routine into a repeatable research process
This guide explains how to read a kessan tanshin. The next step is to use the same review order every time. The Japanese Stock Research Tools page brings together the planned checklist, AI counterargument prompts, and Pine Screener workflow behind this site. No paid products are currently available. Free guides and practical examples are available while the tools are being tested.
Related pages
This guide is part of an English series on researching Japanese stocks with screeners and primary sources.
My conclusion
The kessan tanshin is the fastest window into a Japanese company — unaudited, standardized, and readable with a small vocabulary of repeated terms. The summary page plus the progress-rate habit covers most of what earnings season requires.
Read the document first, form the Fact / Inference / Unknown split, and only then look at the chart. Speed matters in Japanese earnings season, but the order of operations matters more.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not investment advice, financial advice, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. I am an individual investor sharing my research process. Please verify all information independently using official sources before making any investment decision.
Affiliate disclosure: This article may contain affiliate links, including links to TradingView. If you sign up through these links, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Affiliate relationships do not determine whether a stock is included in my research notes.