The Stove Gets a Line

In the year to March 2026, the makers reporting to Japan's gas and oil appliance makers' association (JGKA) shipped 2,276 thousand cassette stoves into the domestic market, worth ¥5,770 million ($35.23 million) at the factory gate. That is a member-company tally: exports excluded, and the association discloses neither its member count nor what share of national output they cover. Set it beside the ¥330.3 billion ($2.016 billion) of gas appliances the same association counted that year and the category is 1.75% of the total — our division, not a published ratio. Iwatani Corporation, the listed company whose name travels abroad with the portable butane stove, reported consolidated revenue of ¥908.5 billion ($5.547 billion) over the same twelve months. The two figures come from different places and do not divide into each other. What the filings offer instead is a location.

The location is in the segment note. The segment-information note and the revenue-recognition note of Iwatani's 83rd-term securities report — the year to March 2026, EDINET code E02567, with identical wording in the 82nd — list what each reportable segment sells. Total Energy: household, commercial and industrial LPG, supply equipment, LNG, petroleum products, kitchen and housing equipment, residential fuel cells, gas heat pumps, daily goods, cassette stoves and cassette canisters, mineral water, detergent, health food, electricity, and others. The filing assigns hydrogen to Industrial Gas and Machinery, next to oxygen, argon, helium, welding equipment, industrial robots and semiconductor production equipment. The stove and the argon are in different segments. The stove and the LNG are in the same one. Within that segment nothing is disclosed by product, so placement is what there is.

Total Energy booked ¥367.7 billion ($2.245 billion) of external revenue in the year to March 2026, 40.5% of the consolidated total; Industrial Gas and Machinery ¥288.7 billion ($1.763 billion), 31.8%; Materials ¥218.4 billion ($1.333 billion), 24.0%. The filing gives the yen; the percentages are ours. Segment profit inverts the order at the top: Industrial Gas and Machinery ¥15.41 billion ($94.08 million) against Total Energy's ¥13.50 billion ($82.42 million) and Materials' ¥11.61 billion ($70.88 million). Margins on segment revenue are 3.6% for energy and 5.3% for the other two. Corporate costs sit unallocated in a negative ¥5,725 million ($34.95 million) adjustment, so these are pre-overhead figures. The inversion is one year's: Total Energy's number carries a ¥5,927 million ($36.18 million) year-on-year profit decline the company attributes to LPG market conditions.

Book values give the shape of it. The Sakai LPG import terminal stands at ¥5,528 million ($33.75 million). The eighty LPG centers, the third-tier filling bases, total ¥15,992 million ($97.63 million). The subsidiary plant at Omihachiman that makes the cassette canisters carries ¥1,942 million ($11.86 million) and twenty-seven employees. Now put the association's fiscal 2025 figure alongside: ¥5,770 million ($35.23 million) of cassette stoves leaving the gates of the manufacturers it surveys, against ¥15,992 million standing on eighty depots the company lists among its principal facilities, a list it says is not the full roster of filling stations. One is a year of shipments. The other is a number that sits.

Third-party industry data reproduced in the fact book ranks the company fifth in Japanese LPG imports for fiscal 2024, at 881 thousand tonnes and a reported 8.5% share; the denominator behind that percentage is not defined in the document. In wholesale volume for the same year it ranks first, at 1,520 thousand tonnes, 2.6 times the second-placed firm, though that figure equals its own disclosed consolidated volume for the year, which suggests the table simply adopts it. In direct retail customers, again fiscal 2024, it ranks first at about 1,200,000 households. Same year, then: 1,520 thousand tonnes sold against 881 thousand tonnes imported, a gap the fact book itself reads as volume procured from other suppliers. Consolidated LPG sales volume for the year to March 2026 was 1,527 thousand tonnes.

The top of the chain is not Japanese. The LP Gas Association puts imports at 85.2% of national supply in fiscal 2023, 10,374 thousand tonnes against 1,803 thousand tonnes of domestic production, which the association does not split between refinery by-product and petrochemical sources; on our arithmetic over its series, that domestic figure is down 56% since fiscal 2017. Of the imports, 62.5% came from the United States, 18.1% from Canada, 14.3% from Australia and 5.0% from four Middle Eastern suppliers added together, of which Saudi Arabia was 22 thousand tonnes. The company's own history dates its first import terminal to August 1980 and its contract with the Saudi state oil company to that May; the securities report dates the start of direct Saudi imports to February 1981. Wherever the cargoes originate now, it is largely not there.

The distance between the tanker and the burner has a name in the disclosure. The company reports a market factor capturing the lag between LPG import price and eventual sale, and it was negative ¥5.7 billion ($34.8 million) in the year to March 2026 against positive ¥0.2 billion ($1.2 million) the year before. Strip it out and operating profit was ¥44.0 billion ($269 million) versus ¥46.0 billion ($281 million), a 4.3% decline rather than 17.1%. It is a company-defined, unaudited measure with no published derivation. It is also the plainest statement in the filings that this is an import business.

The measure comes in two sizes. That negative ¥5.7 billion is the year's own figure, ¥5,710 million ($34.86 million). The line in the segment bridge is ¥5,930 million ($36.20 million) negative, because a bridge shows movement against a prior year in which the factor was ¥210 million ($1.28 million) positive; the shareholders' report gives the same difference as ¥5,927 million ($36.18 million) and the briefing slide rounds it. By quarter the year ran ¥1.18 billion, ¥1.94 billion, ¥2.44 billion and ¥0.14 billion negative ($7.20 million, $11.8 million, $14.9 million and $0.85 million), so most of it was over before the fourth quarter. The mechanism, in the company's account: wholesale prices follow the import price, about three months pass between import and sale, forty days of that a statutory stockpile, and a round trip in the price nets to nothing. Midway through the year it changed the inventory valuation underneath from first-in-first-out to weighted average, an effect it puts at ¥200 million ($1.22 million) positive.

Underneath, the market shrinks slowly. National LPG demand fell from 14,733 thousand tonnes in fiscal 2015 to 12,689 thousand tonnes in fiscal 2024, down 14%, with household and commercial use down 10% and autogas down 58%. Household accounts numbered 24,406 thousand in fiscal 2022, down only 2% over a decade, while household consumption fell 8.7%: the meters stayed, the volume through them did not — an inference from two series, not a measured per-household figure. The count depends on which count you take. A ministry working group puts LPG at 21.73 million accounts as of 31 March 2022, 36% of all households against 44% on city gas, drawn from mutual-aid enrolments — a different population from the association's demand customers, rather than a rival estimate of the same thing.

Its own retail base runs the other way. Direct households went 1,100 thousand at end-March 2023, then 1,110 thousand, then 1,200 thousand, then 1,210 thousand at end-March 2026: plus 110 thousand over three years, of which 90 thousand arrived in one of them. The target is 1,300 thousand by the plan's final year, which leaves 90 thousand to find in two years against the 10 thousand found in the last one, four and a half times the recent pace, on our arithmetic. Asked about it, the company said M&A deals large and small were in hand and the target was achievable, and named none; gross additions and disconnections are not broken out, so the churn the deals have to cover first is not readable either. The market it is buying into, on its own chart, runs from about 17,800 operators to about 12,200 and from about 24,100 thousand LPG households to about 21,600 thousand, drawn from a trade publisher's yearbook with the company's estimates on top, plotted from 2018 to 2030 with none of the points labelled by year. Its middle household figure, about 23,300 thousand, is a third count of the thing counted twice above.

So where is the stove in this. The shareholders' report puts Total Energy revenue at ¥378,782 million ($2.312 billion) for the prior year, to March 2025, against ¥367,732 million ($2.245 billion) for the year just ended, and breaks out nothing inside either. What the medium-term plan does instead is set the category a volume: 2,200 thousand cassette stoves sold in fiscal 2022 rising to 3,400 thousand in fiscal 2027, up 54%, and 98 million canisters rising to 130 million, up 32%, published in June 2023 and explained throughout by units and customer counts rather than by price or mix. The plan's five-year overseas investment line of ¥94.0 billion ($574 million) lists a new cassette stove and gas plant among its contents. Set the 3,400 thousand-unit target beside the 2,276 thousand units the association's members shipped domestically in fiscal 2025 and the two do not stand on the same base: the association counts its own members and excludes exports, and the plan is counting the company's own sales. For the year itself the company gives the category neither units nor revenue. The one number it puts on the stove is somewhere else.

It is in the results briefing. Total Energy's segment operating profit went from ¥19,520 million ($119.2 million) to ¥13,498 million ($82.41 million), and the company splits the ¥6,021 million ($36.76 million) decline six ways: market factor ¥5,930 million ($36.20 million) negative, retail ¥1,330 million ($8.12 million) positive, wholesale ¥810 million ($4.95 million) negative, industrial use ¥10 million ($61 thousand) positive, energy-related equipment ¥310 million ($1.89 million) positive, and cassette stoves and cassette gas ¥940 million ($5.74 million) negative. The six sum to ¥6,030 million ($36.81 million) against a stated decline of ¥6,021 million, which is rounding. The waterfall is the one place the category is given a figure of its own, and the figure is a change in profit: the briefing attaches no revenue and no unit count to it.

Read what that figure is. Take the market factor out and the segment's profit fell by ¥94 million ($574 thousand), to ¥19,207 million ($117.3 million); inside that near-standstill the stove line is ¥940 million ($5.74 million) negative, ten times the net movement and the largest negative of the five remaining lines, with retail's ¥1,330 million ($8.12 million) the thing offsetting it. The November interim briefing already carried the line at ¥630 million ($3.85 million) negative, measured against the prior first half; the May figure is measured against the prior full year, so the ¥310 million ($1.89 million) between them is a difference of two year-on-year deltas rather than a second-half result, which is as far as the disclosure goes. In November the company gave the half's weakness a cause, a slowing Chinese economy. In May the account of the ¥940 million is one clause: sales were weak in Japan and in China. No units, no revenue, no price, no split between the two countries. Whether the category lost volume, lost margin per unit or changed mix cannot be separated from what is disclosed, and the level of profit the category earns is not given at all, only the direction it moved.

The category's arithmetic is worth spelling out. Divide the association's fiscal 2025 shipment values by units — it publishes no average prices — and a cassette stove leaves the factory at about ¥2,500 (roughly $15); a gas cooktop, freestanding and built-in together, at about ¥39,000 ($238). Split that second figure: 1,129 thousand freestanding units at about ¥20,550 ($125) each, 1,229 thousand built-ins at about ¥56,190 ($343). The two categories shipped nearly the same number of units, 2,276 thousand cassette stoves against 2,358 thousand cooktops, and the cooktops were worth ¥92.3 billion ($563 million) against ¥5,770 million ($35.23 million). By value the cassette stove is one of the smallest gas-appliance lines the association tracks, level with gas heating appliances at ¥5,727 million ($34.96 million).

The canister behaves differently from the stove. Across the six years the association publishes, canister shipments stayed between 139 and 148 million units and ended at 143 million, while stove shipments ran 3,500 thousand, 3,035, 2,717, 2,281, 2,648, 2,276. For fiscal 2025 the association says the fall was largely a reaction to disaster-stockpiling shipments, and marks that as its own supposition; the comment came in March 2026 with the estimate, names no disaster and quantifies no contribution. It offers no matching account of the 16.1% rise the year before, so reading that rise as the stockpiling itself is an inference rather than the association's statement. Fiscal 2025 also exists in two versions: a March estimate of 2,325 thousand stoves and a May actual of 2,276 thousand, printed as 86.0% of the prior year, on figures the association rounds before publishing.

The consolidated year that contains all of this: revenue up 2.9% to ¥908.5 billion ($5.547 billion), operating profit down 17.1% to ¥38.3 billion ($234 million), ordinary profit ¥55.2 billion ($337 million) including ¥12.2 billion ($74.5 million) of equity-method income, and net profit up 17.8% to ¥47.7 billion ($291 million) on one-off asset disposals — the results release reports ¥11,141 million ($68.02 million) of net gain on fixed-asset disposals and ¥23,389 million ($142.8 million) of proceeds from sales of tangible fixed assets, and the securities report attributes ¥11,296 million ($68.96 million) of gain to the sale of the former Tokyo head office. Total Energy's revenue fell 2.9%, which the company puts on low LPG import prices feeding through to selling prices; its profit fell 30.8%, which it puts on lower wholesale volumes, the market factor and weak cassette stove and canister sales at home and abroad, partly offset by improved retail profitability.

Next door the swings are larger and named differently. Industrial Gas and Machinery earned ¥15,414 million ($94.10 million), down ¥2,158 million ($13.17 million) on revenue up 6.4% to ¥288,730 million ($1.763 billion), and its bridge puts hydrogen at ¥4,050 million ($24.73 million) positive against specialty gases at ¥5,750 million ($35.10 million) negative, which is helium. For helium the company names the axis: Russian-produced gas went into China, the market softened, profitability fell, and the ¥2,840 million ($17.34 million) recovery it forecasts for the coming year is market price and price revisions rather than volume. In the note column of the same briefing it adds that the strait closure stopped Qatari shipments and North America is now the only source, without setting that beside the recovery. Materials, the third bridge, moves in tens: ¥290 million ($1.77 million) positive on functional resins, ¥360 million ($2.20 million) negative on resources and new materials. Across the three bridges the company breaks out for the year, nothing positive is as large as the hydrogen line.

For the year to March 2027 the segments move. Guidance restates the year just ended into a new structure: two consolidated subsidiaries shift out of Other and into Total Energy, and the segment's ¥367.7 billion ($2.245 billion) and ¥13,498 million ($82.41 million) become ¥396.4 billion ($2.420 billion) and ¥15,075 million ($92.03 million). The filing says two companies moved and restates sales and profit for the move; it does not name them or give what they earn, so the restated line cannot be taken apart — that caution is ours, not the filing's. From ¥15,075 million the segment bridge runs to ¥23,100 million ($141.0 million) on four lines: market factor plus ¥5,710 million ($34.86 million), LPG plus ¥960 million ($5.86 million), energy-related equipment plus ¥440 million ($2.69 million), cassette stoves and cassette gas plus ¥920 million ($5.62 million). The slide does not tabulate the labels against the values; the four sum to the stated total within rounding. The market-factor line is last year's loss reversed exactly, because guidance assumes the factor is zero. Company-wide it is ¥960.0 billion ($5.861 billion) of revenue and ¥48.8 billion ($298 million) of operating profit, struck on ¥150 to the dollar and $550 a tonne of imported LPG against ¥151.14 and $549 realised in the year just ended, with no sensitivity to either disclosed. The stove's ¥920 million would put the category back within ¥20 million ($122 thousand) of where it began.

The plan these years belong to asks for ¥65.0 billion ($397 million) of operating profit in its final year, the one ending March 2028; it was struck in June 2023 on an assumed ¥125 to the dollar and $700 a tonne of imported LPG, against the ¥150 and $550 in this year's guidance. Operating profit has gone ¥50.6 billion ($309 million), ¥46.2 billion ($282 million), ¥38.3 billion ($234 million), two consecutive declines, and guidance for the fourth year is ¥48.8 billion ($298 million), which leaves ¥16.2 billion ($98.9 million) to find in the fifth. Return on invested capital was 4.0% against a 6% target and a weighted average cost of capital the company puts at 5.5%; return on equity was 11.6% against a 10% target, on a net profit lifted by disposal gains — the shareholders' report puts extraordinary income at ¥18,979 million ($115.9 million) and attributes the lift to gains on fixed-asset disposals. The dividend is held at ¥47.00 ($0.287) a share, a payout of 22.7% becoming 23.8% against a forecast of lower net profit, and neither document mentions a repurchase or a cancellation. Asked, the company said it was keeping the target. Three of the five years are behind it.

On currency: every yen figure here is converted at ¥163.8 = US$1, the rate on 24 July 2026, applied uniformly to all periods regardless of when the yen figure arose; no historical or period-average rates are used, so dollar figures are a translation convenience and not a statement about what anything was worth at the time. Dollar amounts carry the significant figures of the yen amount they translate, so consolidated revenue of ¥908.5 billion becomes $5.547 billion. Ratios, percentages, multiples, tonnages, unit counts and headcounts are left unconverted.