First Japanese lock in 246 — JPY 1,600bn, at 90%.

We lock a binary: Sony Group's reported consolidated operating income for FY2026 is JPY 1,600bn or higher. Confidence 90%.

Guidance was raised to JPY 1,720bn. Our threshold sits JPY 120bn, about 7%, below that.

The headline from Sony's first quarter is operating income up 40%. Underneath it sits approximately JPY 80bn of US tariff refunds, around 70% of which was recognised in that single quarter. A one-off of that magnitude inside a beat is precisely what makes naive extrapolation wrong: annualising a quarter that contains a non-recurring receipt manufactures a forecast the business will not deliver.

The underlying performance is nonetheless real and is what supports the lock. Imaging and sensing sales rose 26% with operating income up about 2.3 times to a first-quarter record, and Game and Network Services took the largest segment upgrade. Sony is genuinely three or four different businesses — gaming, music, pictures, image sensors, and a financial arm — and that diversification is why a single segment stumbling rarely breaks the group number.

The residual 10% is currency and content. Sony reports in yen while earning heavily in dollars and euros, so a sharp yen appreciation compresses the reported figure mechanically. The pictures and music segments also carry release-timing risk that can move a quarter without anything structural changing.

Before building this tranche we grepped the scorecard for Japanese corporates and found zero. The series had locked US, Chinese, Indian, European, Australian, Taiwanese and New Zealand companies, and had covered Japanese macro through a wage-settlement mirror brief, but had never once locked a Japanese company's own reported numbers. For the world's third-largest economy that is a real gap rather than a rounding error, and a forecasting record that systematically omits a major market is quietly less useful than its headline count suggests.