Mid-term plan 2028 “Go Beyond”: overseas M&A and battery materials (2026)

The wager inside a three-year plan that turns to offence

What this plan asks is one thing: how far an independent trading house that has repaired its financial base can push from defence into attack. The improvements in ROE, credit rating and DOE accumulated under the 2025 mid-term plan are the resources for an offensive, and Go Beyond is the wager that commits those resources to two fields of high uncertainty — overseas M&A and battery materials. That the ASG acquisition became the largest in the company’s history is itself a sign that the Nakagawa management is serious about the bet.

At the same time, the battery-materials business faces the headwind of a slowing pace of EV adoption, and the fact that the previous plan ended with steel handling volumes below target hints at the limits of a trading business that cannot read its markets to the end. How close will three years bring the target of lifting overseas revenue to 50%? Will the ASG purchase remain a single move, or be the starting gun for a run of acquisitions driving strategy in Europe and the Americas? At the time of writing, the answers are not yet in.