Obayashi Corporation (1802.T) : juste valeur

Thèse ACCE

Obayashi is one of Japan's big four general contractors, building offices, data centres, hospitals and civil infrastructure, with a sizeable overseas construction and development business in the US and Southeast Asia. Its moat is scale and a long record on large, complex projects, which matters when clients and public tenders favour contractors with the balance sheet and track record to carry multi-year work. Revenue growth of 19.0% is the headline, and the mix of data centre and domestic infrastructure demand, alongside Japan's ongoing construction backlog, is the likely driver behind it, though the data here does not break that out. The stock looks interesting on earnings power: a trailing P/E of 11.8 is well below the forward P/E of 21.1, which implies the market expects earnings to compress from current levels, so the question for a deeper look is whether that expectation is right. A 5.2% operating margin on a 14.4% gross margin leaves little room for cost overruns, and the 16.2% ROE is respectable but reflects a low-margin, asset-light-leaning model rather than a high-return franchise.