11.7% of Japanese listed filers reported a net loss. In Korea the figure is 38.2%

We have opened company pages for the Japanese listed market: 3,672 companies, one page each, built from the annual securities reports they filed with Japan’s Financial Services Agency. That puts two complete filed-accounts sets on the same site for the first time, and the first thing worth doing with them is the simplest — count how many companies in each market lost money.

The loss rate is the figure that does not need interpreting. Roughly one Japanese listed filer in nine reported a net loss on its most recent annual accounts. In Korea, on fiscal 2025, it was closer to two in five.

The balance-sheet line runs the other way, and mildly: the median Korean filer carries slightly more equity against assets than the median Japanese one. Solvency and profitability are different questions, and on this data they do not point the same way.

What would make this comparison wrong

Four things, and they are all in the data rather than in the interpretation.

The periods are not identical. Korean figures are fiscal 2025. Japanese figures are each company’s most recent filing on file, and because 59.9% of Japanese companies close their books in March, most of those cover April 2025 to March 2026. They overlap; they are not the same twelve months.

The accounting standards are not identical. Korean filers report under K-IFRS. Japanese filers report under Japanese GAAP, IFRS or US GAAP depending on the company. We did not normalise between them, and a margin computed from two different standards is not a clean like-for-like.

The populations are not identical. Each market sets its own listing thresholds, which decides who is in the count before any accounting question arises.

And we are not explaining the gap. A count of loss-making filers is a count. Why one market’s distribution sits where it does is a question these two tapes cannot answer, and we would rather leave the gap visible than fill it with a story.

Why the median, not the average

One very large filer would pull an average far enough to hide the ordinary company. Toyota’s accounts should not decide what “a Japanese listed company” looks like, and Samsung’s should not decide it for Korea. Every central figure above is a median computed inside its own market, and every one of them skips — rather than zero-fills — the rows where an input was missing.

Revenue is the one line we have left out of the comparison column above. Comparing a yen median against a won median means picking an exchange rate, and an exchange rate is a number we would be making up rather than one the companies reported.

Company-level pages for the Japanese market are at /japan/companies, and the Korean set is at /companies.