[Obayashi] Strengths — The Three Precepts and 8,000+ Engineers

Note: This article is a factual summary based on Obayashi Corporation’s published IR material (Investors’ Guide, June 2026 edition). It is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Figures are as of the publication of the source material. Investment decisions are your own responsibility.

Page 7 of the Investors’ Guide 2026 is the most values-driven page in the whole document — a single framework the company calls “Our Pride, Strengths, and Direction of Sustainable Growth” that connects its founding philosophy to where it wants to take the business next. It sits between the group’s historical timeline and its value-creation model, and reads as the bridge between the two: where the company came from, what it says it is good at, and what it intends to do with that. Unlike most of the guide, this page carries almost no numbers at all — its argument is made entirely in qualitative terms, which makes it worth reading closely rather than skimming for figures.

Our Pride: the Obayashi Three Pledges

The guide states its foundational philosophy plainly: guided by the philosophy of the Obayashi Three Pledges to quality, value, and efficiency since its founding, the company says it will continue to pursue honest craftsmanship. The Three Pledges were formally set out in 1935, in guidelines published for on-site employees (see History), and this page treats them as the throughline connecting the company’s 1892 founding to the much larger, more diversified business it runs today.

Our Strengths: three “powers,” plus scale

The page is laid out as three horizontal bands — Our Pride, Our Strengths, Our Direction of Sustainable Growth — each building on the one above it. The middle band lists three cultivated strengths said to support honest craftsmanship.

Strength	What it means
Power of Vision	To see beyond tomorrow
Power of Creation	To transform ideas into tangible innovations
Power of People	That makes everything possible

Read narrowly, the three map onto distinct phases of a project: vision to conceive it, creation to build it, and people to run the organization that makes both possible. None of the three is defined in construction-specific terms, which looks deliberate — vision, creation, and people are broad enough to justify a construction company moving into green energy or software-driven new business initiatives, not just building bigger or more complex structures. Layered on top of these three qualities is sheer headcount: the guide describes the group as having well over 8,000 construction engineers, calling them world-class. It is this combination — a stated philosophy, three qualitative strengths, and a large technical workforce — that the guide presents as the base the rest of the business is built on.

Our Direction of Sustainable Growth

The guide then sets out an explicit long-term ambition for how those strengths get applied: expansion into new areas through cultivated strengths, building what it calls a diversified global business portfolio centered on domestic construction — worded so that businesses other than domestic construction eventually generate performance equal to or greater than domestic construction itself. Five business areas are shown as a sequence, labelled as seeds for creating new business opportunities:

• Domestic Construction
• Overseas Construction
• Real Estate Development
• Green Energy
• New Business Initiatives

The ordering matters: it runs from the oldest, largest business (domestic construction) to the newest and smallest (new business initiatives), presenting each as building on the one before it rather than as unrelated bets. In the guide’s own diagram the five are drawn as a row of connected circles with an arrow running beneath them, captioned as seeds for creating new business opportunities — visual shorthand for the same idea, that each later business grows out of strength accumulated in the ones before it. This is the same five-way breakdown used one page later in the guide’s value creation model, where each business’s specific competitive strength is spelled out in more detail — this page supplies the philosophy behind that model, and the strengths that are meant to carry across all five.

Reading this page against the rest of the guide

It’s worth checking this ambition against where the group stands today. Per the company overview, domestic construction alone still supplies about three-quarters of consolidated operating profit, so the direction stated here describes an intended trajectory rather than the current balance. The same three powers of vision, creation, and people also resurface later in the guide as the screening criteria behind New Business Domains, which gives this page a second job beyond a mission statement: it previews the logic that decides what the company chooses to build next, long before that logic gets applied to any specific new venture.

This article is part of our complete breakdown of the Obayashi Investors’ Guide 2026. See the hub article for the full series.

Note: This article is a factual summary based on Obayashi Corporation’s published IR material (Investors’ Guide, June 2026 edition). It is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Figures are as of the publication of the source material. Investment decisions are your own responsibility.