Japan IT services: NEC and Fujitsu set to drive enterprise AI monetization, Staying Buy

Research evidence excerpt

Japan IT services: NEC and Fujitsu set to drive enterprise AI monetization, Staying Buy

Japan IT services

29 June 2026 Citi Research

n Earnings forecasts — For NEC, we forecast FY3/27 non-GAAP OP of ¥454bn

(YoY+14%). Despite the dropout of extraordinary public IT services demand, we

expect OP to beat guidance (¥420bn) due to strong ANS (defence, aerospace,

submarine cables) profits. For Fujitsu, we forecast FY3/27 adjusted OP of

¥415.9bn (YoY+7%) versus guidance of ¥425bn. We expect hardware solutions

and ubiquitous solutions to undershoot guidance due to higher memory costs.

AI and RoI

RoI by area

Is AI RoI high in all areas? Having begun with AI utilization based on chatbots and coding by engineers,

corporate AI adoption is now shifting to the implementation of AI agents across a

wide range of business domains. As implementation is applied more broadly, a key

discussion is whether "the economic value of the work justifies the AI cost." For

example, the usage fees for an AI agent in the legal domain are highly likely to be

justified by the economic value of the work in that domain. The regulatory industry,

including lawyers, is short-staffed, and the cost per person-month is high.

Furthermore, many legal tasks are rule-based, making it relatively easy to confirm

the accuracy of AI processing. Therefore, the RoI of automating these tasks with AI

is high. Call center operations are another area where RoI is relatively high. Because

the work involved is chiefly manual-based responses and is standardized, the

automation effect can easily scale with the large number of cases, even if the cost

per person-month of the personnel being replaced is relatively low.

The first area is repetitive work handled by specialized personnel with high person-

month costs.