Capital Expenditure YoY

Capital Expenditure YoY is the year on year change in Investment in plant and equipment (corporate spending on factories, machines and software). It is section 4 of the Quarterly Financial Statements Statistics of Corporations by Industry, covering firms with capital of 10 million yen or over. The publisher is the Ministry of Finance Policy Research Institute (MOF), under the Statistics Act as a Fundamental Statistical Survey (a legally based survey). Above 0% means investment expanded year on year; below means it contracted.

Responses cover each calendar quarter (3 month periods ending in March, June, September and December). Questionnaires (survey forms) go out mid month after each quarter; answers are due by the 10th of the following month. Results appear in early March, June, September and December at 8:50 Japan Standard Time (UTC+9, Tokyo time); dates can shift. Each release publishes sales, ordinary and operating profits, plant investment with and without software, and inventories, with revisions to past adjusted rates.

Headline moves reflect Manufacturing (factory based investment) and Non-Manufacturing (service based investment) pulling in different directions.

• All Industries: aggregate of Manufacturing and Non-Manufacturing; headline excludes Finance and Insurance.
• Manufacturing: plant investment by makers of goods; cyclical core of capital spending.
• Non-Manufacturing: investment by construction, trade, real estate, leasing, information, transport, power and services.
• Finance and Insurance: surveyed separately since 2008; never in headline All Industries.
• Software split: each cell shows investment including software and a lower row excluding software.
• Capital size splits: results break into 1 billion yen or over, 100 million to 1 billion yen, and 10 to 100 million yen.

In October to December 2024, published March 4, 2025, All Industries fell 0.2% year on year to 14,451.8 billion yen, almost flat. Manufacturing rose 0.8% to 5,244.2 billion yen, led by transport equipment (+11.0%) and food (+15.9%), while Non-Manufacturing fell 0.8% to 9,207.6 billion yen. Weak information and communications (down 25.9%) and construction (down 11.2%) dragged the headline negative. Seasonally adjusted investment rose 0.6% quarter on quarter (versus the prior quarter), so yearly and quarterly rates can sign differently.

1. Population estimate: each sampled firm's provisional figure (early self settled accounts) is scaled up by stratum (industry and size groups) to estimate the quarter total. Firms under 500 million yen are sampled systematically; firms at or over that level are fully enumerated.
2. Year on year rate: headline uses original values with YoY = 100 x (It minus It-4) divided by It-4. It-4 is the same quarter a year earlier; for example, 128,214 against 119,161 a year earlier gives 7.6%.
3. Seasonal adjustment: quarter on quarter reference series uses X-12-ARIMA (a seasonal adjustment method). Past adjusted rates are revised each quarter and the model is reviewed yearly; no weekday or leap year adjustment is made.
4. Aggregation: adjusted including software equals adjusted excluding software plus adjusted software; adjusted All Industries equals Manufacturing plus Non-Manufacturing.