Automakers around the world will likely be forced to continue production cutbacks in the coming months before a global semiconductor supply shortage can be resolved, industry experts say. Japan's Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. have said they partially halted production at factories around the world due to the chip shortage just as they began recovering from pandemic-forced plant shutdowns. Demand for chips, widely used in electronic devices including those in vehicles, has been surging across various sectors since last fall as the global economy picked up. "A gap in demand and supply for semiconductors suddenly occurred late last year due to a coincidence of some events including a sharp recovery in global auto sales, robust sales of smartphones and installment of the 5G networks," said Yoshiharu Izumi, senior analyst at SBI Securities Co. As video game sales jumped with people spending more time at home, robust production of game consoles ahead of the rollouts in November of Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.'s PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X console from Microsoft Corp. also contributed to the chip supply crunch, experts say.

Taku Toguchi knew he wanted a career in artificial intelligence as far back as when he was a teenager. Now 36, the college dropout and serial entrepreneur has joined the ranks of Japanese founders building fortunes in AI, thanks to a stock-market rally that turned his company into one of the nation's most richly valued. AI inside Inc., which went public in December and specializes in digitizing handwritten documents, has been among the biggest beneficiaries of surging investor optimism toward companies that use AI and other technologies to enable remote working. While some analysts have questioned whether the stock's almost ninefold gain is sustainable, AI inside has ambitious plans to expand outside Japan and into other business lines. "It feels like we're being hugely recognized," Toguchi said in an interview.

It's the rise of the robots: Japan's second-largest company is now a maker of industrial automation systems, highlighting the rising importance of a less visible sector to a nation long associated with consumer-facing brands. Keyence Corp., a maker of machine vision systems and sensors for factories, has jumped 17 percent this year to become Japan's second-largest company by market value. At a valuation of almost ¥11 trillion ($100 billion), it has overtaken telecommunications giants SoftBank Group Corp., and NTT Docomo Inc., which have jostled for the honor to sit behind Toyota Motor Corp. over most of the past decade. Keyence is famed for its dizzying profitability with an operating profit margin of more than 50 percent, among the country's highest. That's enabled by its "fabless" output model, according to analysts, with production of its array of pressure sensors, barcode readers and laser scanners outsourced to avoid high capital costs.

A Japanese language school whose stock soared almost 12-fold last year is planning to expand into new businesses as its chief executive officer tries to keep the rally alive. RareJob Inc., a Tokyo-based online English conversation school that uses teachers in the Philippines, will focus on areas including leadership training and job placement, Gaku Nakamura, the company's founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview. Nakamura said one of his goals is to boost the company's market value to ¥100 billion ($922 million) from its current level of about ¥25 billion. RareJob surged 1,093% in 2019, the second-best performance in Japan's Mothers market of smaller shares, after it surprised investors by saying earnings would jump. Analysts -- and history -- suggest it will be difficult to keep up those gains after the company's valuation exceeded 100 times estimated profit.

Online securities firms in Japan are fighting for survival by diversifying services in the wake of a sharp drop in stock broker fees following their full liberalization 20 years ago. "The time when we could compete by lowering fees is over," said Rakuten Securities Inc. Brokerage fees were fully liberalized on Oct. 1, 1999, as one of the final steps in the financial system shake-up that was dubbed the "Big Bang." The reduction in fees then accelerated as online securities firms jumped into the market with the spread of the internet. In the year ended in March, the proportion of stock brokerage fees securities firms received stood at 0.03 percent of the Tokyo Stock Exchange's total trading value, which is one-tenth the 0.36 percent ratio posted in the year ended in March 1999, before liberalization took place. SBI Securities Co., the largest online brokerage, had 4.71 million trading accounts at the end of June, which is comparable with the number at Nomura Securities Co. "We've improved the quality of our services while making fees overwhelmingly low" for individual investors, said Yoshitaka Kitao, president and chief executive officer of SBI Holdings Inc., the parent of SBI Securities.

Mizuho Financial Group Inc. will start artificial-intelligence trading to bolster its Japanese equity business, according to people with knowledge of the plan. Japan's third-biggest lender will begin offering an algorithm-based AI trading service to some large institutional clients in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, the people said, asking not to be identified because the plan is private. The product attempts to predict how stock prices in Japan will change over an hour and find the best time to trade, they said. Global banks are seeking to improve the quality of their trading execution and equity research before the European Union's revision of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, or MiFID II, comes into force in January. Under the new rules, brokerages will be required to separate research fees from trading commissions to ensure investors pay fair prices for the services, a move that may spur competition.

SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son aims to stay at the helm of his company longer than originally planned to focus on the burgeoning business field of artificial intelligence, but is now under increased scrutiny over his longer-term strategy after the surprise departure of his successor. Son faces a number of challenges, including turning around U.S. mobile network provider Sprint Corp., a SoftBank group company. And most recently, the abrupt resignation of SoftBank President Nikesh Arora, the heir apparent credited with making bold overseas investment decisions, has raised uncertainty about the conglomerate's investment business, analysts say. Arora's departure, coming less than two years since he joined SoftBank from Google Inc., caught many off guard, putting the company's succession planning back to square one. "SoftBank is known to do the unexpected," said Tsutomu Yamada, market analyst at kabu.com Securities Co. "The bottom line is he has been and will be the commander in chief. With Mr. Arora leaving SoftBank, there are more uncertain factors than before regarding its prospects," he added.

A Japanese startup is entering the equity research business in a bid to challenge the dominance of securities firms by using computers to crunch vast troves of information and predict companies' earnings. Nowcast Inc., a financial-technology venture formed last year out of the University of Tokyo, will begin providing automated earnings estimates of consumer goods makers as soon as October by analyzing millions of transactions at retail stores, Chief Executive Officer Ryota Hayashi said. The move comes as pressure from Japan's financial regulator prompts brokerages to move away from a long-standing practice of gleaning information from companies about their performance before earnings figures are released. Hayashi sees this as an opportunity for Nowcast to find other ways to estimate companies' results and sell the research to active investors such as hedge funds. "This doesn't mean analysts won't be needed anymore," Hayashi said in an interview.