PRE-MARKET AUSTRALIAN, JAPANESE & SOUTH KOREAN STOCK NEWS: Earnings from James Hardie, Nick Scali, Mitsubishi Motors, Nintendo, SoftBank, KT&G Corp & Naver
AUSTRALIA
Charter Hall Retail REIT (CQR AT) - Co. FY (AUD) net rose 78% Y/Y to 389.4mln, operating earnings rose 4.0% Y/Y to 153.4mln and rev. fell 11% Y/Y to 176.9mln. (Dow Jones Newsplus)
Coles Group (COL AT) - Co. plans to move as many as 1,000 jobs to India under a deal with Accenture to cut costs and invest in its online operations amid competition from Amazon. (AFR)
James Hardie Industries (JHX AT) - Co. Q1 (USD) adj. net was 209.3mln, net was 104.3mln, operating income was 217.7mln and rev. was 1.47bln (exp. 1.42bln), with adj. EPS of 0.36 (exp. 0.32); Co. raised its FY27 outlook and targets pro forma sales growth of 5.9-9.0% and pro forma adj. EBITDA growth of 7.4-13.7%. (Dow Jones Newsplus)
Nick Scali (NCK AT) - Co. FY (AUD) net rose 31% Y/Y to 75.7mln and rev. rose 4.3% Y/Y to 516.7mln. (Dow Jones Newsplus)
ResMed (RMD AT) - Co. Q4 (USD) adj. EPS was 2.95 (exp. 2.89) and rev. was 1.46bln (exp. 1.46bln). (Dow Jones Newsplus)
Westpac Banking Corporation (WBC AT) - Co. and AMP Frontier will partner on AI engineering. (Newswires)
Mining
Glencore’s ASX listing ambitions have reopened the possibility of a Rio Tinto merger, an acquisition of the Co.’s coal business or a stand-alone Glencore demerger, according to deal sources. (AFR)
JAPAN
Fujifilm Holdings (4901 JT) - Co. began reviewing a partial spinoff and potential IPO of its Business Innovation unit, which accounts for 35% of consolidated revenue, as it shifts investment towards semiconductors and biopharma. (Nikkei/Newswires)
Mitsubishi Motors (7211 JT) - Co. Q1 (JPY) net rose 21.7% Y/Y to 3.01bln and rev. rose 38.4% Y/Y to 597bln. (Newswires)
Nintendo (7974 JT) - Co. Q1 (JPY) operating income was 142.6bln (exp. 74.1bln), while Switch 2 unit sales reached 3.82mln. (Newswires)
ORIX Corporation (8591 JT) - Co. Q1 (JPY) net rose 162% Y/Y to 280.8bln and rev. rose 17% Y/Y to 876.6bln, while write-downs of long-lived assets were 9.82bln (prev. 1.00bln Y/Y). (Newswires)
Round One (4680 JT) - Co.’s July sales in Japan rose 22% Y/Y to JPY 10.3bln, with growth across all segments. (Newswires)
Shimadzu Corporation (7701 JT) - Co. Q1 (JPY) net rose 68% Y/Y to 13.3bln and rev. rose 10% Y/Y to 130.6bln. (Newswires)
SoftBank Group (9984 JT) - Co. Q1 (JPY) net was 347.33bln (exp. 165.83bln), pretax profit was 589.2bln (prev. 689.0bln Y/Y), rev. was 2.020tln (prev. 1.820tln Y/Y), basic EPS was 60.08 (prev. 72.93 Y/Y) and total investment gains were 1.859tln; Co. also used its OpenAI stake as collateral to borrow USD 10bln. (Newswires/Dow Jones Newswires)
Sojitz (2768 JT) - Co. plans to sharply increase cattle-processing capacity in Vietnam this year as it expects beef consumption to grow alongside the country’s economy. (Nikkei)
Tokyu Fudosan Holdings (3289 JT) - Co. Q1 (JPY) net fell 17% Y/Y to 25.5bln and rev. fell nearly 1% Y/Y to 285.8bln. (Newswires)
Other News
Japan’s Financial Services Agency will consider changing rules governing proprietary trading systems as trading volumes on alternatives to the Tokyo Stock Exchange increase. (Nikkei)
SOUTH KOREA
KT&G Corporation (033780 KS) - Co. Q2 (KRW) net was 362.1bln (prev. 143.5bln Y/Y), while overseas tobacco sales rose 19% Y/Y to 557.7bln. (Yonhap)
Naver Corporation (035420 KS) - Co. Q2 (KRW) net was 698.6bln (exp. 480.9bln), operating profit was 520.3bln (exp. 561.8bln) and rev. was 3.39tln (exp. 3.37tln). (Yonhap/Newswires)
LG Group - Chairman Koo Kwang-mo will meet NVIDIA (NVDA) CEO Huang in the US next week to deepen cooperation in AI infrastructure and robotics. (Yonhap)
Other News
South Korea’s industry minister said the US is expected to announce the results of its Section 301 investigation into alleged overproduction by the end of August. (Yonhap)
A broad Asian pre-market earnings sweep, the kind of session where single-stock dispersion rather than any index-level read is the established pattern. The distinction worth drawing is between the clean beats and the mixed prints: Nintendo's operating income nearly doubling consensus on early Switch 2 sell-through fits the familiar pattern of console-cycle launches, where hardware attach and margin trajectory through subsequent quarters matter more than the opening print. SoftBank's headline net nearly doubling estimates sits on investment gains rather than operations, and the market has historically discounted such quarters when the swing is mark-driven; the use of the OpenAI stake as collateral for a large dollar borrowing is the more durable tell, consistent with the group's long-running pattern of levering listed and unlisted holdings to fund AI commitments. Naver's net beat against an operating-profit miss is the mirror image, and Korean platform stocks have tended to trade the operating line over the bottom line. On the corporate side, Fujifilm's review of a spinoff and IPO of a unit representing a large share of revenue follows the established Japanese playbook of portfolio pruning into semiconductor and healthcare exposure, where such reviews typically run for quarters before terms emerge. The Glencore ASX-listing angle reopens Rio Tinto merger and coal-demerger speculation of a kind that has surfaced repeatedly without consummation, and the watch items are the Section 301 overproduction findings flagged for later this month and the LG-NVIDIA meeting, both of which carry sector-wide read-across beyond the named tickers.