OPINION: Japan seems to be the home of “sleeping giants” of green tech, and this is not the only reason to be bullish on Japanese stocks, BrettArends writes.
It’s mid-November, and people in Boston are still wearing shirt sleeves. Last year was the warmest on record, just surpassing 2016, says NASA. The past 25 years has seen a string of record years. Meanwhile the latest climate “summit” in Scotland seems to have been another disappointment. China, the world’s biggest polluter by far, didn’t even bother to show up.
Especially interesting for investors is that Japan seems to be the home of “sleeping giants” of green tech: Companies that have poured a ton of money into low-carbon technology that is only now starting to ramp up. The standout from MSCI’s research is Toyota TM, +0.53%, which has filed more low-carbon patents than anyone else on the planet. It makes more cars than any other company in the world, and is rapidly increasing its output of electric and hybrid vehicles.
We shouldn’t really be surprised that the Japanese are taking the climate crisis seriously. The country has struggled for the kind of issues, such as overcrowding, and a shortage of domestic energy, that may become more common if the future works out badly. Let’s not forget that Japanese companies in the main are loaded up to the gunwales with cash. Many of them have no effective debt—they have more money in the safe than they owe in the bond market. The biggest issue for stockholders for years, the lack of dividends, is slowly changing. Japanese companies in total have grown their annual payouts by 300% in the last 20 years, according to FactSet—faster even than U.S. companies.
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