Ryobi Heads Into November Earnings With Value Intact

Ryobi Limited enters its November 5 earnings date carrying a stock that has shed 4.6% over the past month but nudged 0.3% higher on the week, closing at JPY 2,641, with the market showing little conviction in either direction ahead of the print.

The borrow market tells a quiet story. Availability is extraordinarily loose, with roughly 9,367% of short interest still available to lend, meaning the lending pool is barely being touched. Utilization has eased further from 3.6% in mid-September to just 1.1% now, and the short score has drifted steadily lower across the past two weeks, from 25.67 to 25.63. Together these readings place Ryobi in the 94th percentile of the ORTEX short score universe for low short-side pressure. Cost to borrow data is stale, last recorded on October 1 at 0.80%, but the broader availability picture confirms this is not a name where bearish positioning is building. Shorts are simply not interested.

What investors are paying for looks more compelling than the share price implies. Ryobi trades on a price-to-book ratio below 0.77, well under the book value of its assets, and the EV/EBITDA multiple is running at roughly 4x. The earnings yield ranks in the 82nd percentile of the ORTEX universe, and the dividend score sits in the 96th percentile, though dividend history data is stale beyond 2022 and should be treated with caution. The factor profile is that of a deep-value name: cheap on assets, cheap on earnings, and carrying an 87th percentile days-to-cover rank that reflects how lightly the short side is positioned. Analyst coverage data is nearly two years old and carries no usable current consensus.

The ownership register adds a layer of strategic interest. Techtronic Industries, the Hong Kong-listed power tool manufacturer behind brands including Milwaukee and Ryobi globally, holds 5.7% of shares and added roughly 172,000 shares in the period to June 2026. Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance, by contrast, trimmed its position by 457,496 shares to 4.4% as of September. The Ryokokai Shareholding Association, an employee-linked holder, remains the largest on the register at 6.9% and added 56,000 shares over the same period. The balance between the strategic industrial holder building its stake and the life insurer reducing exposure is worth watching as a signal of long-term confidence in the business.

Earnings history provides some context for the November 5 release. The May 2026 print produced the sharpest reaction on record in the available data, with the stock rising 7.6% the next day and extending gains to 9.9% over the following week. The August reports were more muted, with moves of roughly 3% on the day and 5% over the week. Whether the May outsized reaction was driven by the result itself or broader market conditions is unclear from the data available, but it does indicate the stock can move meaningfully around prints.

Among closest TSE peers by correlation, 5715 gained 3.3% on the day and 6140 added 3.1%, while the broader peer group was mixed on the week, with several names off 1 to 2%. Ryobi's modest weekly gain of 0.3% left it trailing its more correlated industrial peers, which may reflect some caution building ahead of next Wednesday's numbers rather than any stock-specific deterioration.

The key question heading into November 5 is whether Ryobi's earnings print can validate the deep-value multiples, or whether the month's 4.6% pullback signals a market expecting a softer result.