RaymondsIndex

This month, Japan's regulators did something quietly radical. The Corporate Governance Code revision — the first in six years — will require listed companies to demonstrate that they are actually using their cash rather than stockpiling it. The number behind the reform is staggering: roughly $840 billion in idle cash, the highest cash-to-market-cap ratio in the developed world. In FY2025/26, Japanese firms returned just 37.6% of earnings as dividends, against an international average of 54.3%. The capital exists. It simply isn't moving. That phrase — capital that isn't moving — is the entire premise of capital efficiency analysis. Return on invested capital (ROIC) is supposed to tell you how well a company turns money into more money. But ROIC is a backward-looking ratio. By the time it visibly deteriorates, the underlying behavior has been in place for several reporting periods. The more revealing question is not "what is the return?" but "where is the cap...

The week opened with two reminders that distress is rarely sudden. In Seoul, the Financial Services Commission's delisting reform takes effect on July 1 — and the Korea Exchange's own simulations now estimate that roughly 150 KOSDAQ companies (with some projections reaching 220) could face delisting this year, far above the 50 first anticipated. The market-cap requirement rises to ₩20bn on July 1, a new "penny-stock" trigger is added, a half-year full-capital-impairment criterion is introduced, and disclosure-violation standards are tightened. In the United States, Salesforce offered a different version of the same story: a fresh round of layoffs, a $50B buyback supporting earnings per share, and the acquisition of usage-based billing platform m3ter — capital returning to shareholders even as the headcount that produces it comes down. These look like unrelated headlines. Through the lens of relational risk, they rhyme. Zone D, Zone C, and the Weekly Pulse. Raymonds...

This week handed us two clean teaching cases — one from Seoul, one from Mumbai — for the two RaymondsIndex signals investors most often ignore until it's too late: Cash Governance (CGI) and Momentum Alignment (MAI). The Seoul case: where did the raised cash go? A KOSDAQ-listed materials company resolved to issue ₩10 billion of unsecured private-placement convertible bonds. The stated purpose was not capital expenditure, not R&D, not debt repayment — it was the acquisition of securities in other companies. Half of the issue, ₩5 billion, was subscribed by an investment entity identified as a related party of the firm's largest shareholder. Capital was raised from the market and routed, in part, back through the controlling network — into financial holdings rather than the operating business. This is precisely what CGI is designed to detect. Cash Governance asks a deceptively simple question: once a company raises money, does it actually reach the business? CGI weights idl...

This week, prosecutors in Seoul indicted five people behind one of the cleaner illustrations of relational risk you will find. In 2023, the group acquired a struggling KOSDAQ-listed company through a debt-free takeover — no capital of their own, funded instead by private lenders charging 260% annual interest. They then announced what every theme-chasing investor wanted to hear: Chinese capital, entry into the secondary battery business, and an exclusive ten-year supply arrangement worth up to 6 trillion won. A 60-billion-won convertible bond issuance was disclosed with no realistic prospect of execution. The stock rose roughly 900% in a single month, from 3,545 to 29,450 won. Trading was halted; the company is now being delisted. About 15,000 retail shareholders were left holding the loss, while prosecutors say the group extracted 14.3 billion won from the company and pocketed 13.8 billion won in illicit gains through borrowed-name accounts. The fifth path: Retailization In Capitalis...

Two stories broke this week, in two different markets, and they are the same story. In Seoul, Korea's Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) imposed penalties totaling ₩1.08 billion on a KOSPI-listed broadcaster's disclosure officer and his father. The officer — the employee responsible for publishing the company's material information — learned of an upcoming strategic content partnership with a global OTT platform between October and December 2024, bought shares before the announcement, and passed the tip along. Their combined illicit gains: roughly ₩870 million. His short-swing trading profit of ₩510 million was separately returned to the company under the Capital Markets Act. In the United States, a securities class action was filed against Veritone, an AI software company, after it admitted that previously reported financial statements could no longer be relied upon. Revenue had been overstated and net losses understated through misapplied accounting — an error in val...

This week delivered two case studies in the same lesson, from opposite sides of the Pacific. In Seoul, the Securities and Futures Commission concluded its review of Korea Zinc and Young Poong — the two houses that spent years locked in one of Korea's most expensive corporate control battles. On June 10, the regulator sanctioned both. Young Poong, it found, omitted or understated massive provisions for soil and groundwater contamination around its Seokpo smelter — a legal cleanup obligation that simply never made it onto the balance sheet at full size. Korea Zinc understated losses from a private equity fund investment and failed to recognize impairments on overseas subsidiaries whose recoverable value had fallen well below book. Both companies face surcharges, three years of externally designated auditors, and recommendations to dismiss responsible executives. In Texas, Inotiv, Inc. — a Nasdaq-listed contract research organization — filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 on June 3. Its pat...