One Segment, Eight Digits

One number in Keyence's 57th annual securities report, filed on 15 June 2026, is carried to the last yen: ¥21,783,259 (US$132,987), the average annual pay of the 3,306 people employed by the filing company as of 20 March 2026. Eight digits, unrounded. The segment note beside it runs a single sentence — the group is one segment centred on the manufacture and sale of electronic applied equipment, so segment information is omitted. Two of the three related-information items are then omitted in sentences of their own, each on its own threshold; the third, geography, carries amounts.

What the form asks for is narrower than what the line delivers. In the ordinance text in force from 25 June 2026, Form 2's instruction (58-3)b — reaching annual reports through Form 3 — calls for the filing company's employee count, average age, average length of service and average annual pay, with bonuses named inside the definition. Whether that pay figure is written to the yen or rounded to the thousand is not in the instruction. Keyence's line reads 3,306 people, 35.0 years of age, 11.3 years of service. The company's own note adds that the average includes non-base wages as well as bonuses; the phrase for non-base wages appears in neither form. Whether this version of the form governed this report is a separate question, and it turns on eleven days.

The figure covers 3,306 of 12,784 consolidated employees, 25.86% of the group (3,306 ÷ 12,784). The other 9,478, who include the staff of the overseas sales subsidiaries, appear as a headcount with no pay figure beside it, because the ordinance writes the pay item about the filing company. Consolidated headcount over five years runs 8,961, 10,580, 12,286, 12,261, 12,784; the filing company's runs 2,599, 2,788, 3,042, 3,205, 3,306.

Last year the same line read ¥20,391,138 (US$124,488) for 3,205 people, so the average rose 6.83% ((21,783,259 − 20,391,138) ÷ 20,391,138). That change rate is an item in the 25 June 2026 text of (58-3)b. A separate amendment, Cabinet Office Ordinance No. 5 of 2026, promulgated on 20 February 2026, applies the new Form 3 to fiscal years ending on or after 31 March 2026, by supplementary provision Article 2(6); Keyence's 57th year ended on 20 March 2026, eleven days short of it. In the current Form 3 the employee table sits in Part 4, item 5, beneath a new heading for basic policy on human-capital strategy. In this report it sits in Part 1, item 5 — and a clause-by-clause comparison with the superseded form is not something these sources support.

The payroll number is an input further into the same document. Directors excluding outside directors received ¥295 million (US$1.80 million) among seven people, classified in the remuneration table as fixed, with performance-linked pay of zero. The report also sets out the method: the base is the prior year's annual income of employees who head organisations, multiplied by a coefficient capped at 3.0, and roughly 60–75% of that base is itself linked to operating profit. One individual crosses the ¥100 million (US$611 thousand) disclosure line and is named — Nakata Yu, ¥182 million (US$1.11 million), all of it fixed.

For the business itself the governing text is ASBJ Statement 17. Its Basis for Conclusions describes the management approach — the way management divides the company to allocate resources and assess performance (§45) — and the standard then applies tests. A component reaching 10% of combined sales, of absolute profit or loss, or of assets is reportable (§12), and components are added until reported external sales reach 75% of the income statement (§14). Read together, those tests only bite once management itself divides the company; the standard does not spell out the single-segment case, and that inference is ours.

Related information survives the single segment. §29 requires three items — products and services, geography, major customers — and states that a company reporting one segment must disclose them anyway. Two of the three are then omitted on their own thresholds: products and services because a single category exceeds 90% of consolidated sales, major customers because no counterparty reaches 10% of it.

The customer sentence is a boundary rather than a blank. Ten per cent of consolidated sales of ¥1,169,289 million (US$7,138.5 million) is ¥116,928.9 million (US$713.9 million), so every external customer sits below that figure. What §32 calls for once the test is met is the name, the sales amount and the related segment; a top-ten share, or a count of customers above some lower line, is not among the enumerated items and does not appear. The Business Conditions section states the same conclusion in its own wording — there the test is framed against total sales rather than against the consolidated statement's sales figure.

Geography is where amounts do appear. The related-information note gives Japan ¥390,066 million (US$2,381.4 million), the United States ¥225,751 million (US$1,378.2 million), China ¥186,550 million (US$1,138.9 million) and other ¥366,920 million (US$2,240.0 million), against an overseas subtotal of ¥779,222 million (US$4,757.2 million). The three overseas lines add to ¥779,221 million, ¥1 million (US$6,105) short of the printed subtotal, and Japan plus overseas comes to ¥1 million less than consolidated sales. The note offers no reconciliation, and the residue shows up twice.

Profit is not among the geographic items. §31 lists external sales split between Japan and overseas, and property, plant and equipment split the same way; the report gives PPE of ¥65,716 million (US$401.2 million) domestic and ¥29,002 million (US$177.1 million) overseas. The nearest figures to a regional margin sit in the affiliated-companies table: Keyence Corporation of America, sales ¥224,772 million (US$1,372.2 million) and ordinary profit ¥24,584 million (US$150.1 million), a 10.9% margin; Keyence (China), 8.3%. Those are entity results struck after intra-group pricing, and they are not the same measure as the group's: the report puts consolidated ordinary profit at 54.4% of consolidated sales, and the filing company's own works out to 67.87% of its own (570,397 ÷ 840,383). The two American numbers do not tie either — the geographic note's United States line and KCA's sales are ¥979 million (US$6.0 million) apart, one being an aggregation of group companies located there, the other one company's income statement.

The English results materials of 24 April 2026 partition the world on different lines. Across an 18-page deck there are no regional sales amounts and no regional profit, and the categories are Japan, Overseas, Americas, Asia and Europe & Others, with no Greater China heading. What the slides carry is growth — overseas +13.5% as reported and +12.9% in local currency for the year, Europe & Others +8.4% and +2.9% — and composition ratios struck on overseas sales rather than the group, with Americas at 36.1% of overseas in the fourth quarter. The deck also runs an axis presented there as voluntary disclosure and absent from the single-segment note: customer industry, six categories crossed with Japan and overseas, rounded to 5% increments by its own footnote, with the Japanese mix identical across three half-year periods.

Currency appears in both registers, in different units. The securities report names exchange movements among the causes of the year's changes; the amounts for that effect are in the results materials, which put the year's currency contribution at about +¥3.1 billion (US$18.9 million) of sales and about +¥1.8 billion (US$11.0 million) of operating profit — roughly 0.3% of the ¥595,759 million (US$3,637.1 million) reported, our arithmetic on a figure the deck itself labels approximate — and give sensitivities of about ¥0.9 billion (US$5.5 million) of operating profit per ¥1 against the dollar and about ¥0.5 billion (US$3.1 million) per ¥1 against the euro.

Operating profit rose 8.4% on sales up 10.4%, and the margin moved from 51.9% to 51.0%. This year's gross margin is 83.02% of sales and SG&A 32.07%, a difference of 50.95%; the prior year's cost of sales and SG&A totals are not in these documents, so the 0.9-point move cannot be split between the two from the disclosure. Three SG&A lines are given for both years and rose ¥22,955 million (US$140.1 million) together — staff pay and bonuses +10.4%, the bonus provision +18.4%, research and development +13.8%. Ordinary profit rose 13.3%, and that difference does reconcile: non-operating income went from ¥16,320 million (US$99.6 million) to ¥40,491 million (US$247.2 million), and non-operating expenses were ¥494 million (US$3.0 million) against ¥5,085 million (US$31.0 million) implied for the prior year by its operating profit plus non-operating income less its ordinary profit. Operating profit's increase of ¥45,984 million (US$280.7 million), which is 595,759 less 549,775, plus ¥24,171 million (US$147.6 million) of non-operating income, plus the ¥4,591 million (US$28.0 million) fall in non-operating expenses, comes to ¥74,746 million (US$456.3 million) — the same as 635,756 less 561,010, both figures differences we struck rather than lines the statements print.

The heading Production, Orders and Sales yields two amounts and a sentence. Production for the year was ¥1,214,740 million (US$7,416.0 million), stated at selling prices by the company's own note, which puts it ¥45,451 million (US$277.5 million) above sales and out of contact with cost of sales of ¥198,552 million (US$1,212.2 million). Orders carry no amount: the company runs an immediate-delivery system, orders roughly track sales, and the backlog is stated to be immaterial. Sales are one line. In the ordinance text in force from 25 June 2026 that is not an itemised heading in Form 3, and the production, orders and sales instruction that does exist — Form 2's (32)a(b) and (c) — is conditioned on presenting an interim consolidated balance sheet, so it does not normally bite for an annual report. What sits unconditioned, inside the MD&A instruction at (32)a(d), is sales by counterparty and each counterparty's share of total sales, with counterparties below 10% omissible.

The properties instruction asks for main facilities of the filing company, domestic subsidiaries and overseas subsidiaries, with book value by asset type, land area and headcount. The table lists four sites, all of the filing company, and no plant: head office and laboratories at ¥11,926 million (US$72.8 million) and 672 people; the logistics centre at ¥46,970 million (US$286.8 million) and eight; the quality evaluation facility at ¥2,905 million (US$17.7 million) and 189; the Takatsuki site at ¥1,005 million (US$6.14 million) and 79. Plans for new construction or retirement: none stated. The word fabless occurs once in the 78 pages, inside the product-quality risk. The filing company's own manufacturing costs of ¥176,929 million (US$1,080.2 million) run 73.9% materials, 14.0% outsourced processing, 2.4% labour and 9.7% other.

Cash and deposits, securities and investment securities sum to ¥3,008,193 million (US$18,365.0 million), or 82.0% of total assets of ¥3,670,655 million (US$22,409.4 million); adding long-term deposits of ¥20,220 million (US$123.4 million) gives 82.5%. The bond schedule and the borrowings schedule in the consolidated supplementary tables each read not applicable — two required tables whose content is that there is nothing to tabulate. Investing cash flow of −¥312,387 million (US$1,907.1 million) is 77.8% purchases of securities and 9.1% property, so reading that line as capital spending would overstate the spending about elevenfold.

Three human-capital ratios appear, all struck on the filing company: male take-up of childcare leave at 84.7%, and women's pay as a percentage of men's at 43.2% across all workers, 43.7% for regular employees and 92.0% for part-time and fixed-term staff. The company gives the bases — the childcare figure follows the rule that counts childcare-purpose leave alongside childcare leave, and the pay ratio follows the women's-participation law, so it moves with grade and length-of-service composition. The share of women among managers is one of the selectable items under that law, and no such figure appears in the 78 pages. The one stated target is an engagement-survey score of 70% or better, recorded as met and recorded as a filing-company target. The officers are ten men and two women, 16.7%.

Dividends give two totals for one year, both correct. The annual dividend was ¥550 per share (US$3.36), and the earnings release puts the total attributable to the year at ¥133,388 million (US$814.3 million), a 30.0% payout. The cash flow statement shows ¥109,136 million (US$666.3 million) paid, because payment lags declaration: the prior year's year-end dividend, half of that year's ¥84,883 million (US$518.2 million) since interim and final were equal, plus this year's interim of ¥66,694 million (US$407.2 million), comes to ¥109,135.5 million (US$666.3 million) — the reported figure to within half a million yen. Repurchases for the year were 266 odd-lot shares at ¥15,752,270 (US$96,168), and the two resolution-based acquisition tables read not applicable.

The form requires one more count, and this one is of the holders. As of 20 March 2026 foreign corporations and other foreign entities hold 1,223,782 of the 2,430,151 trading units, foreign individuals 65 more — 50.36 percent, from the printed 50.36 and 0.00, summed here because the table has no total line for the two. Against the 3,167 companies whose shareholder tables we reconciled from EDINET, median 7.31 percent, half the register is foreign. The report they would read to find the segment breakdown, the customer list and the product split is the one in this piece, and it is in Japanese.

The two documents that carry the year in full are separated by language. The IR library's securities-report page lists 57 PDFs covering the 40th to 57th terms and none carries an _en filename; the English library's Securities Reports page carries the same Japanese files (both checked on 30 July 2026). The annual report runs fifteen years, 2012 to 2026, and every file is _en. Under the exchange rules in force from 1 April 2025, the English-required set for Prime companies is earnings materials and timely disclosures, and the exchange's own FAQ states that a summary satisfies it; shareholder-meeting notices and the corporate governance report sit outside that set as documents which are not timely disclosure. The library lists eight English earnings-release summaries and nine English results decks, the decks beginning in July 2024.

The ordinance governing the next report has already changed: the employee table moves to Part 4, with a new item on basic policy for human-capital strategy above it. The segment note in this report remains one reported segment. In this year's report the finest-grained number is an average over 3,306 people carried to the last yen, and the coarsest is the company itself, carried as one.

Yen amounts are converted at ¥163.8 = US$1, the rate quoted for 24 July 2026 by TradingEconomics — a source outside the company's disclosure, four months after the 20 March 2026 year end, and not a rate used anywhere in the financial statements. It is applied uniformly to every period regardless of when an amount arose; the dollar figures therefore carry no information about currency movement within or between years. Each conversion keeps the significant figures of the yen amount as published. Ratios, percentages, multiples, headcounts and share counts are left unconverted.