Cosel (6905) sales jump 54.0% on AI power orders

Cosel's September 18 results marked a turning point for a company that had been reporting losses. The first quarter, covering May 21 to August 20, delivered 7.8 billion yen in sales and a 545 million yen operating profit, reversing a 389 million yen loss a year earlier. Management also lifted the full-year operating profit forecast from 1.335 billion yen to 2.3 billion yen. The stock opened to buy orders on the afternoon of September 18, trading volume exceeded 10 times the usual level, and buying continued after the long weekend, pushing the September 25 close to 1,474 yen, about 12% above the pre-announcement level.

The company's explanation pointed to demand spreading through the AI supply chain. Orders from the semiconductor manufacturing equipment industry reached roughly 3.5 billion yen in the first quarter, more than four times the approximately 800 million yen a year earlier. Cosel said its customer equipment manufacturers are performing well for generative AI memory manufacturers, indicating that investment in AI-oriented memory such as HBM is reaching the power supplies inside the equipment. Orders received accumulated to 13 billion yen, or 2.5 times the same period last year, and the order backlog reached 17.9 billion yen, up 94% year-on-year.

Cosel has also been reshaping its business. It completed the sale of its loss-making Swedish subsidiary Powerbox on September 1 and increased its annual dividend to 60 yen while raising the lower limit of its DOE guideline from 3.5% to 4.5%. Still, the company itself expects first-quarter orders to settle down from the second quarter, so the question is whether the demand surge proves to be a durable shift toward power as an AI bottleneck or a one-quarter bump. How that plays out will matter to investors holding Cosel and other Japanese power-supply names tied to AI infrastructure spending.