What Changed in the Risk Pages

The section is headed 事業等のリスク, business and other risks. It has been part of the Japanese annual securities report for years, but the shape it takes today dates from an amendment to the Cabinet Office Ordinance on Disclosure of Corporate Affairs promulgated by the Financial Services Agency on 31 January 2019, which asked filers to explain, for each risk, the degree and timing of the likelihood that it materialises, the content of its effect on the business, and the measures taken against it, with the rule applying to fiscal years ending on or after 31 March 2020. An overseas reader who opens a report at this section usually reads it on its own. The question this desk put to it is different: set the June 2026 section beside the same company's June 2025 section and ask what moved. The reading covers thirty-five of the largest filers, seventy reports, with the section taken from the printed heading to the heading of the next major section — the management analysis, material contracts or research and development — the sub-headings taken from numbered lines, and each sentence of the 2026 text checked for a word-for-word match in the 2025 text.

By sub-headings, fifteen of the thirty-five companies carried the same set from one June to the next — Toyota, Nintendo, Recruit Holdings, Shin-Etsu Chemical, Hitachi, DENSO, Honda, Mitsubishi Corporation, ITOCHU, Daikin, FANUC, HOYA, East Japan Railway, Central Japan Railway and SMC — and twenty added, dropped or renamed at least one. By sentences the spread is wider. SMC's 2026 section repeats 35 of its 36 sentences from 2025, or 97.2%, and Toyota's repeats 102 of 109, or 93.6%; Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' repeats 1 of 61, or 1.6%, and Advantest's 2 of 201, or 1.0%. A heading that survives can sit over a paragraph that did not, and a section rewritten from the first line can list the same risks as before. The two measures have to be read together, and both describe the extraction rather than the documents' intent.

Toyota's nineteen headings — three category headings and sixteen numbered risks — are identical in both years, in the same order, from 市場および事業に関するリスク (market and business risks) and its first item, 自動車市場の競争激化 (intensifying competition in the automotive market), to the last, which runs from natural disasters through infectious disease, war, terrorism and strikes. What changed sits under item 5 of the first category, ブランド・イメージの維持・発展 (maintaining and developing the brand image). The 2025 report, on page 39, followed the general statement about legal compliance with six sentences of example: that irregularities in certification had come to light and been announced at the consolidated subsidiaries Hino Motors in March 2022 and Daihatsu in April 2023; that at the company itself, in an investigation of type-approval applications carried out on an instruction from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism dated 26 January 2024, it was found that seven models, including some no longer in production, had since 2014 been tested by methods differing from the national standard, and this was reported to the ministry on 31 May; that a corrective order on certification work was received in July; that the ministry's on-site inspection pointed to seven models and eight cases not following the prescribed procedure; that a recurrence-prevention report was submitted in August; and a cross-reference to the section on issues to be addressed. In the June 2026 section, as extracted, those six sentences are gone and the paragraph moves from the sentence that the group and its suppliers cannot be guaranteed to achieve this in every situation straight on to the consequences for the brand. The character string 認証, certification, occurs in the 2025 section and not once in the 2026 section as extracted.

Three smaller Toyota edits are of the kind a year makes. Under 自動車市場の需要変動 (fluctuation in demand), the 2025 text described the fiscal year just ended — a world economy that kept growth at around 3%, with a firm American labour market and a Chinese property slump cushioned by fiscal policy, and an automotive market in which the pent-up demand that followed the easing of the semiconductor shortage had run its course. The 2026 text drops both sentences and goes from the general statement to the line that such changes in demand are continuing and that their course is unclear. Under the heading on laws, regulations and administrative measures applied to the automotive industry, the 2025 sentence about the large increases in United States import tariffs announced in 2025, including tariffs specific to the automotive industry, and the retaliatory tariffs announced by other countries, now ends with a new clause: high tariff rates continue at present. And under climate change, drought and wildfires, which the 2025 text listed among long-term changes alongside rising temperatures and sea levels, are listed in 2026 among sudden weather events with typhoons, floods and tornadoes.

Sony Group numbers its risks. The June 2025 report had twenty; the June 2026 report has nineteen. The one that is not there is 2025's number 13, on page 32: that amendments to laws and regulations or movements in financial markets could adversely affect the results and financial position of the financial services business classified as a discontinued operation. The same 2025 report explained the classification: on page 28, that the board had decided on 14 May 2025 to put the execution of a partial spin-off of the financial services business, with effect from 1 October 2025, to a board meeting in early September 2025, the execution being subject to the Tokyo Stock Exchange's approval of the listing of Sony Financial Group's shares and other approvals; and on page 32, that from the first quarter of fiscal 2025 the financial services business was classified as a discontinued operation under IFRS 5. The June 2026 report records, in a note to its key figures on page 2, that the partial spin-off of Sony Financial Group was carried out on 1 October 2025; in its risk section the risks numbered 14 to 20 in 2025 are numbered 13 to 19 and the heading on the financial services business is not among them. One more edit is in the first risk, on competition: the 2025 sentence said that the evolution of innovative technologies such as generative AI, and their use by competitors, could damage existing business models; the 2026 sentence says that technologies such as AI could affect them.

Nintendo's section has four numbered headings — risks relating to the economic environment, to business activities, to legal regulation and litigation, and その他, other — and they are unchanged. One passage was condensed, under the business-activity risks, in the part headed 市場環境の変化や他社との競争 (changes in the market environment and competition): in June 2025, on page 14, four sentences described the company's aim of offering Nintendo's unique kind of play that anyone can enjoy intuitively, the integrated hardware-and-software dedicated video game platform business placed at the core of management, the basic strategy of expanding the number of people who have access to Nintendo IP, and the structure built through Nintendo Accounts to connect entertainment experiences across platform generations. In June 2026, on page 12, that is one sentence: the group works carefully on the development of each product and service, tries to make its characters and worlds familiar, aims to be loved across generations, and is adding to the reasons to choose Nintendo as unique and safe entertainment. Then the verbs changed — the phrase 影響が及ぶ, an effect may reach, appears eight times in 2025, six of them as 悪影響が及ぶ, and not at all in 2026, while 悪影響を及ぼす, may have an adverse effect, appears five times in 2025 and fourteen in 2026. The 2025 text's two references to evaluation of the group, 当社グループへの評価, are references to evaluation of the brand, 当社ブランドへの評価, in 2026, a third such reference was added to the passage on the leakage of confidential information, and the list of consequences of a failure of the operating systems that support online services gained a first item: suspension of business activities.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries rewrote the section from the first sentence. The 2025 version, on pages 21 to 25, had twenty-one headings: three introductory ones and six risk areas, each printed with two lettered sub-headings, the second of them always 経営成績等の状況に与えうる影響, the possible effect on results. The 2026 version, on pages 18 to 22, has thirteen, and the first area, formerly 事業環境の変化 (changes in the business environment), is now 外部環境の変化に関するリスク (risks relating to changes in the external environment) with four lettered items on page 19: political and economic conditions; モノづくり産業基盤の弱体化, the weakening of the manufacturing industrial base; the advance and spread of AI and digital technology; and changes in markets. Of the sixty-one sentences in the 2026 section, one is carried unchanged from 2025.

All four lettered headings are new as headings; two of them, the manufacturing base and AI, have no counterpart among the 2025 headings, while the political-economic and market items carry material that sat under the 2025 area heading on the business environment. Under the manufacturing base, the report describes a shrinking and ageing population, competition for staff as the labour market becomes more fluid, the prospect that a continued weak yen leads to an outflow of skilled people from Japan and to difficulty hiring abroad, fewer engineering students as young people turn away from manufacturing, and the possibility that a shortage of skilled workers and digital staff at the company and its suppliers breaks the transmission of technique; the countermeasure named is the use of AI to turn skilled workers' tacit knowledge into explicit form. Under AI and digital technology, the report lists the loss of the advantage of its accumulated skilled technique if it is replaced by physical AI — defined in a footnote as AI that operates in conjunction with equipment and machines in real space — delays in efficiency if AI agents are not put to effective use, delays in responding to AI-related laws at home and abroad, and the obsolescence of existing business models through start-ups. The 2025 section had one sentence on AI, on page 23: that as product value shifts from physical performance to software control and the use of data, the group's advantage in manufacturing technology could decline relatively. The fourth item, 市場等の変化, sets the medium-term plan beside current development: the 2024 Business Plan made energy transition a growth area on the strength of the decarbonisation trend, and the report says that, with the world proceeding on a realistic course that weighs energy security and the maintenance of industrial competitiveness, it is developing products such as CO₂ capture from the standpoint of solutions that also have economic rationality; the 2025 section, for its part, already spoke of the realistic energy transition the company had been pursuing.

Nippon Steel's twenty-five numbered headings, in four categories, match one for one between the years, with one renamed and one moved. The first risk, on the economic situation in Japan and abroad, opens with the geography of its sales: in June 2025 domestic revenue was described as about 60% of consolidated revenue and overseas revenue as about 40%, and in June 2026 the figures are about 50% and about 50%. The 2026 text then adds sentences the 2025 text did not have — that base demand in manufacturing and construction is weak at home and abroad; that China's slowdown, a widening supply-demand gap and continued excess production are driving cheap steel exports that depress the international market; that the rise of protectionist trade policy and the imposition of reciprocal tariffs have changed trade measures and the import-export environment; and that geopolitical risk including tension in the Middle East affects the supply of energy and raw materials and spreads through global supply chains, so that its effect cannot be comprehensively or reasonably quantified — and the word 地政学, geopolitics, appears three times in the 2026 section and does not occur in the 2025 section as extracted. The 2025 text's own forward-looking sentences went the other way: that for fiscal 2025 the environment was extremely severe with product and raw-material prices falling sharply; that the start-up of the capacity expansion in India would slip to fiscal 2026 or later; and that the indirect effect of the American administration's tariff policy on a company supplying customers in many industries was enormous and could not at that stage be quantified. None of those three is in the 2026 section.

The renamed sub-heading is number 7, which in 2025, on page 32, read 人材確保・育成、ダイバーシティ＆インクルージョンへの取組み、省力化対策 — securing and developing people, diversity and inclusion, labour-saving measures — and whose last sentences said the company was making labour-saving capital investments to cope with a shrinking population. In 2026, on page 27, it reads 人材確保・育成、DEIへの取組み、業務刷新・効率化, and the last sentences say the company is renewing and streamlining its work, including through DX, to cope with the labour shortage. The moved sub-heading is カーボンニュートラル実現に向けた取組み, efforts towards carbon neutrality: numbered (2) in its category on page 31 of the 2025 report, seventh of the twenty-five overall and directly after the medium- and long-term plan, it is numbered (6) on page 27 of the 2026 report, eleventh overall, after cost improvement, capital investment, reorganisation and overseas investment, and the review of the business structure and production system. That last cluster also lost a list: in 2025 the sub-heading on reorganisation and overseas investment named the transactions by which the group had grown, from the acquisition of Nisshin Steel in March 2017 through Ovako, Sanyo Special Steel, Essar Steel with ArcelorMittal, G Steel and GJ Steel, Nippon Steel Trading, the Elk Valley coal investment, the Kami iron-ore interest and the Blackwater interest, to the merger of its United States subsidiary with United States Steel Corporation in June 2025. The 2026 text, on page 27, says that the group carries out reorganisations and investments such as mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures in Japan and abroad and may continue to do so, without the list.

FUJIFILM Holdings went from eighteen sub-headings to seventeen. The one that went is 2025's number 8, 医薬品事業・再生医療事業に係るリスク (risks relating to the pharmaceutical and regenerative medicine businesses), on pages 28 and 29: that some group companies researched, developed, manufactured and sold pharmaceuticals and regenerative medicine products; that new products required large research investment and a long time to approval and sale; that development might be delayed or halted; and that the group spread the risk by holding several pipelines. In 2026 number 8 is logistics, every later heading moves up one, five sentences changed their wording inside headings that stayed, and two more differ only in the width of their digits. The overseas sales ratio in the first risk is about 65% in 2026 against about 66% in 2025, and the healthcare risk adds, to the consequences of failing to respond to change or to obtain licences in time, a lower margin from manufacturing plants operating below the assumed rate and the booking of impairment losses. The imaging risk lists the same intensifying competition in high-end mirrorless cameras, environmental regulation and supply-chain disruption as before, and the 2026 sentence no longer carries the 2025 clause about falling demand for digital cameras as smartphone cameras improve; in logistics, where the 2025 text named the tightening of the situation in Russia and Ukraine, the 2026 text says the outbreak and prolongation of wars and conflicts; and the climate risk names the body that validated its 2030 target as Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) where the 2025 text wrote Science Based Targets (SBT) イニシアチブ.

Outside the six, the new headings of June 2026 cluster around one letter pair. SoftBank Group added two lettered items under group-wide risks on page 24: OpenAIへの投資, investment in OpenAI, and AIインフラ, AI infrastructure. The first states that as of the end of March 2026 the company had invested a cumulative 34.6 billion dollars in OpenAI through SoftBank Vision Fund 2, had decided in February 2026 on an additional investment of 30 billion dollars, and in March 2026 had signed a bridge facility with a total borrowing limit of 40 billion dollars, mainly to fund it; that as a minority shareholder its influence over OpenAI's decisions is limited and that OpenAI's public-benefit mission may take precedence over the maximisation of shareholder value; and that an eventual listing may not happen at the time or on the terms either party assumes. The second describes the Stargate Project announced in January 2025, a 1.2 GW data-centre site in Milam County, Texas, on which the subsidiary Energy Global is building powered shells under a January 2026 partnership with OpenAI, a 10 GW generation and 10 GW data-centre project at the PORTS Technology Campus in Piketon, Ohio, announced with the United States Departments of Energy and Commerce in March 2026, of which the 9.2 GW of generation falls under the 550-billion-dollar strategic investment initiative agreed between the Japanese and American governments, and a 5 GW project in France announced in May 2026. The segment heading that was アーム事業 in 2025 is AIコンピューティング事業 in 2026, covering Arm and Ampere.

The banks added the same letters. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group added two numbered risks, 21 on third parties and 22 on the development, provision and use of AI, on page 91, and renamed its first risk from the deterioration of the Japanese and world economies to their uncertainty and deterioration. Mizuho added a risk on the use of AI, number 7 on page 76, moved トップリスク from its fourth major heading in 2025, on page 44, to its first in 2026, on page 66, and added a sub-heading on liquidity ratio regulation on page 71. The string AI appears sixteen times in Mizuho's 2026 section and five times in its 2025 one.

Other new headings record an event. Takeda's number 7, on page 29, is リーダーシップの移行および組織変革に関するリスク, risks relating to the leadership transition and organisational transformation: a change of chief executive and of the management team, alongside a broad change in the organisation and operating model, described as bringing short-term uncertainty and execution risk, with an interim leadership structure and a monitoring of organisational health indicators as the response; the 2025 heading on corporate acquisitions became, in 2026, strategic transactions and the related impairment of balance-sheet value. KDDI's new number 10, on page 46, is 内部統制に関するリスク, risks relating to internal control, and the report says under it that a special investigation committee of outside lawyers and accountants found that employees of the consolidated subsidiary BIGLOBE and its subsidiary G-Plan had conducted fictitious circular transactions in the advertising agency business, that past securities reports were corrected, and that an improvement report was submitted to the Tokyo Stock Exchange on 2 June 2026. Daiichi Sankyo's intellectual-property risk, on page 32, now ends with a settled matter: in December 2025 the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held the Seagen patent invalid and reversed the Texas district court's judgment, Seagen did not seek further review by the 2 March 2026 deadline, and the dispute is over.

Oriental Land's new item 6, 酷暑による事業継続, business continuity under extreme heat, on page 30, says that the main business depends on visits to theme parks where much of the experience is outdoors, that climate change with rising temperatures could force large restrictions or changes of policy in park operation and make the current form of summer operation difficult, and gives the likelihood of occurrence as more than five years out. Keyence added two numbered sub-headings on page 13, (9) on recruiting and retaining people and (10) on M&A, to a list of eight that is otherwise unchanged. Murata Manufacturing changed ratings and one heading: its risks are printed with a frequency, 発生頻度, and an impact, 影響度, each on a scale of 小・中・大, and between June 2025 and June 2026 the procurement risk went from 中 and 中 to 大 and 大, with the description gaining the words geopolitical risk and export controls, the new-technology and product-development risk went from frequency 小 to 中, and the heading 人材の採用・確保に関するリスク, on recruiting and retaining people, on page 53 became 人材に関するリスク, on people, on page 46.

Tokyo Electron renamed its eighth risk from 法令・規制, laws and regulations, on page 19 of the 2025 report, to リーガル, legal, on page 18 of the 2026 one, and the list of fields under it gained trade-secret protection and economic security. Two other changes are a single character or a name: Mitsui & Co. changed 社内規定 to 社内規程 in the heading on compliance violations, and NTT's section names its regional subsidiaries as NTT東日本 and NTT西日本 where the 2025 section wrote out 東日本電信電話 and 西日本電信電話. Honda kept its eighteen sub-headings and moved one, 市場環境変化リスク, from fourteenth to seventh. Three companies besides Mitsubishi Heavy Industries recast the section's architecture: Advantest replaced a taxonomy of external-environment, decision-making, financial, governance, IT and operational risks with a risk universe and a list of risk factors; Panasonic Holdings replaced its group important risks and strategic risks with a framework and four named strategic risks; and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group appended an overview of risk management, a risk appetite framework and stress testing to a list that otherwise matches 2025's.

What this reading cannot do. The section is cut from the line carrying 【事業等のリスク】 to the line carrying the next bracketed heading, and sub-headings are taken only from lines that begin with a number, a circled numeral or a letter: an unnumbered bold heading is not counted, a heading that wraps onto a second line is counted by its first line, a table laid out in columns, as Advantest's is, yields fragments, and a numbered footnote can be mistaken for a heading, as Hitachi's ２．発生可能性 was until it was set aside by hand. A first pass that required six characters missed Nintendo's その他, Toyota's 法的手続, three of Keyence's eight and Tokyo Electron's rename; the counts here are from the second pass, with a two-character minimum. Sentences are compared after all whitespace is removed, so a change of one character marks a sentence as changed: of Nintendo's eleven unmatched sentences, eight involve the change of verb, some alongside other edits, and the rest are the condensed passage on the market and competition and two other wording changes; and a heading is joined to the sentence that follows it, so a heading whose number moved up by one, as FUJIFILM's did, marks that sentence as changed. A passage that leaves this section may have gone to another part of the report — Toyota's 2025 sentences on certification pointed the reader to the section on issues to be addressed, and this desk read only the risk section — so an absence here is an absence from these pages as extracted, not from the document. Nor does the count of changed sentences say anything about the quality of a report or the seriousness of a risk: SMC's near-identical section and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' rewritten one sit under the same requirement, and the count measures the overlap of two texts, not the adequacy of either.

The ordinance asked companies to say what could go wrong, how likely it is, and what they are doing about it. Set beside last year's text, the June 2026 sections show three kinds of movement: headings that were not there a year earlier — investment in OpenAI, the advance of AI and digital technology with physical AI beneath it, extreme heat, a leadership transition, internal control; passages that are in the 2025 section and not in the 2026 one as extracted — a certification case, a discontinued financial business, a pharmaceutical business, a list of acquisitions, a forecast for fiscal 2025; and the small edits, a verb, a ratio, a list of weather events, that appear only when the two texts are set side by side. The first kind is what an English reader can find by searching. The second and third exist only in the comparison, and this desk made the comparison from the Japanese originals.