On 18 September 2026 the Tokyo market valued Suzuki Motor Corporation at ¥3,984B, on a price-to-earnings multiple of 9.3 times the company's own forecast. The same afternoon the National Stock Exchange in Mumbai valued Maruti Suzuki India at ₹3,818B, on 26.6 times trailing earnings. Suzuki owns 58.28% of Maruti. At the mid-market rate of ¥1.674 to the rupee, Maruti is worth ¥6,392B, and Suzuki's share of it is worth ¥3,725B, which is 93.5% of Suzuki's entire market value.
The arithmetic leaves ¥259B for everything else Suzuki owns: the Japanese minicar business that leads its home segment, the Hungarian plant that supplies Europe, the motorcycle and marine engine businesses, and the balance sheet that carries them. Maruti reported net profit of ₹146.8B for FY3/2026, of which Suzuki's economic share is about ¥143B; Suzuki's trailing consolidated net income of ¥439B therefore implies roughly ¥296B of earnings from the businesses outside India, and the market is paying under one year of those earnings for them. The two data points are not on the same fiscal calendar and the exchange rate moves daily, so the figures are approximate, and they are the arithmetic of Tangency Point Capital (TPC) on public prices, never a recommendation. They are, though, the cleanest illustration I know of a pattern that runs across a large part of the Tokyo market: Japanese companies with real Indian businesses are priced in Tokyo at Japanese multiples, while the identical cash flows, listed in Mumbai, are priced at Indian ones. Nobody talks about it much, and this article is about why it exists, how deep it runs, and what the last two years of filings say about the direction.
Thirty years, in the reader's own memory
For an Indian reader of a certain age the relationship has a sound: the two-cylinder hum of a Maruti 800. Maruti Udyog was a government company when Suzuki signed its licence and joint venture agreement in October 1982, taking 26% of a venture that most Japanese carmakers had declined; the first Maruti 800 came off the line at Gurgaon in December 1983. It was the car that put a generation of Indian families on the road, and it was Japanese in everything except the badge. After the 1991 reforms Suzuki moved to 50% in 1992 and to a majority by 2002, and on 2 July 2026, while its Prime Minister stood beside India's in Delhi, Suzuki opened its Kharkhoda plant in Haryana, the site announced in 2021 at 900 acres and ₹180B of planned investment, with a planned capacity of a million cars a year once fully built.
Around that first car a whole shelf of Japanese names filled Indian homes. Hero Honda's Splendor and the Honda Activa scooter became the default two-wheelers of the middle class; Yamaha's RX100 became a cult; Sony television sets, Walkmans and later Bravia panels defined what a premium consumer electronics brand meant before Korean rivals arrived; Panasonic, Toshiba and Hitachi were the names on air conditioners and refrigerators, Daikin later joined the names at the top of that market; Canon and Nikon owned the camera counter; Toyota's Innova and Fortuner became the vehicles of every Indian wedding convoy and every state government fleet; Yakult introduced a probiotic drink to households that had never heard the word; Uniqlo opened in Delhi in 2019 to queues. Nippon Paint and Kansai Nerolac painted the walls. A Japanese reader may not realise how much of India's consumer imagination the country's brands already occupy, and an Indian reader may not realise how small a share of those companies' total earnings India still represents. That gap between what India feels like to Indians and what it weighs in a Tokyo annual report is the heart of the pricing question.
The diplomatic scaffolding went up in parallel. Japan and India signed their peace treaty on 28 April 1952, with India choosing a separate treaty and waiving reparations, an act Japanese diplomats still cite. Japan began yen loans to India in 1958, the first country to receive them. Relations were named a Global Partnership in 2000, a Strategic and Global Partnership with annual summits in 2006, and a Special Strategic and Global Partnership at Mr Modi's first summit in 2014; the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement took effect on 1 August 2011. The physical monuments of the relationship are Japanese-financed: the Delhi Metro, built with yen loans and opened in 2002, and the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail corridor of 508.17 km and 12 stations, on which the July 2026 joint statement records Japan's understanding of India's target to run priority sections commercially in 2027, and a shared willingness to explore corridors toward India's stated vision of a 7,000 km national network. Japan is India's largest bilateral donor, with official development assistance disbursement of about ¥440B in 2024-25.
The relationship in the ministries' own figures
I have kept this section to figures the two governments publish themselves, since the point of the article is to price something, and a thesis priced on newspaper numbers is not worth the reader's time.
India's Ministry of External Affairs puts bilateral trade at US$27.48B in FY2025-26, made up of US$6.04B of Indian exports to Japan and US$21.44B of imports from it; the total was US$15.33B in 2020-21, so trade has grown by four fifths in five years, almost all of it on the import side, which is what one expects when Japanese factories in India buy Japanese machinery and components. Cumulative Japanese foreign direct investment into India from April 2000 to March 2026 stands at about US$48.14B, fifth among source countries and 6% of the total; the annual flow was US$3.7B in FY2025-26, against US$1.49B in FY2021-22. About 1,500 Japanese companies are registered in India, half of them manufacturers, operating close to 5,000 business establishments.
The Japan External Trade Organization's FY2025 survey of Japanese companies operating overseas, with 372 respondents in India, found 70.0% of them expecting an operating profit in 2025 and 81.5% intending to expand within one to two years, the highest expansion intent of any country in the survey for the second year running, ahead of Brazil at 64.3% and the UAE at 61.8%. The reason those companies give is growing local demand. That is the commercial engine under everything that follows: the operating subsidiaries are profitable, they want to grow, and their parents in Tokyo are the listed vehicles through which a foreign investor can own them.
The investment targets have moved with the evidence. At the 2022 summit the two governments set a target of ¥5 trillion of public and private investment and financing from Japan to India over five years; at the 15th summit in August 2025 they replaced it with ¥10 trillion of Japanese private investment over the next decade, and the July 2026 statement records progress toward it. The money is arriving in the financial sector too: on 17 September 2025 Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation completed the purchase of 20% of YES BANK from State Bank of India and other institutions, and agreed to buy a further 4.2% for about ₹28.5B (¥51B) at 1.4 times book, taking it to 24.2%.
The cultural connection, and the tourists who are rediscovering it
The relationship is older than any of this. An Indian monk, Bodhisena, presided over the eye-opening ceremony of the Great Buddha at Todai-ji in Nara in 752; Buddhism, the Siddham script in which Japanese temples still write their mantras, the Sanskrit phonetic order behind the kana syllabary, and a great deal of Japanese religious vocabulary came from India by way of China and Korea. In the modern era Tagore's visits to Japan from 1916, Rash Behari Bose's exile in Tokyo, Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army, and Justice Radhabinod Pal's dissent at the Tokyo Tribunal are the episodes both countries' official tellings of the relationship return to. Nehru's gift of an elephant, Indira, to the children of Tokyo in 1949 is the kind of small fact that ambassadors still deploy. Indians have been welcome in Japan for a long time; what is new is that they are going.
The Japan National Tourism Organization's release of 21 January 2026 counted 315,100 visitors from India in 2025, up 35.2% on 233,061 in 2024 and a record, inside a total of 42.7 million visitors to Japan. The two Prime Ministers' joint statement of July 2026 puts two-way visitors at more than 540,000 in 2025, which implies roughly 225,000 Japanese visiting India, so the flow now runs stronger from India than toward it, a reversal of the pattern of the previous three decades. About 59,000 Indians live in Japan, the community growing on IT engineers and the jewellery trade. The LOTUS programme launched in 2024 exchanges more than 300 students and researchers a year and the Sakura programme sends a further 300 students to Japan annually. None of these numbers is large against the two countries' populations, and that is the point: the human traffic is at the beginning of its curve, and it is the leading indicator for the brand familiarity, the joint ventures and the second-generation managers that the capital flow will need.
Takaichi in Delhi
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's first state visit to India ran from 1 to 3 July 2026, for the 16th annual summit. She came with a high-level delegation of senior officials, chief executives and industry leaders, and the Japan-India Joint Economic Forum in Delhi on 2 July, organised with JETRO, Keidanren and the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry on one side and DPIIT, CII and FICCI on the other, seated more than 150 Japanese companies opposite more than 80 Indian ones. The two governments announced 129 cooperation projects concluded between private-sector entities on the occasion of the visit. The Joint Declaration on Economic Security Cooperation, the AI Strategic Dialogue, the Industrial Competitiveness Partnership, the Startup Support Initiative and a Next-Generation Mobility Partnership were signed or restated, semiconductors and critical minerals were named as priority sectors, and a Cooperative Biogas for Growth Initiative set out to build 1,000 biogas and organic fertiliser plants across India. Suzuki's Kharkhoda opening was the corporate centrepiece.
The Indian reader will recognise the choreography from Mr Modi's own visits; the Japanese reader should note what is different from a decade ago. In 2014 the relationship was framed around infrastructure Japan would finance. In 2026 it is framed around businesses Japanese companies will own, in a country whose own capital market prices such businesses at twice the multiple the Tokyo market applies to their parents.
The thesis, worked through
Here is the mechanism in plain terms. A listed Indian company is valued by an investor base that is domestic, growing, and paying for the next twenty years of Indian consumption; Maruti at 26.6 times earnings and Kansai Nerolac at 23.1 times are ordinary numbers in that market. A listed Japanese company is valued by an investor base that is domestic, ageing, and paying for a low-growth home market; Suzuki at 9.3 times and Kubota at 10.9 times are ordinary numbers in that one. When the Japanese company owns the Indian one, the same rupee of profit is valued twice, at two prices, and the parent's share price reflects the lower. Three listed pairs, all priced from the exchanges on or around 18 September 2026 at ¥1.674 to the rupee, show the range.
Suzuki and Maruti Suzuki. Set out above: the stake is worth 93.5% of the parent, and the businesses outside India are implied at under one year of their own earnings.
Kansai Paint and Kansai Nerolac. Kansai Paint was worth ¥504.8B on 18 September, on 17.8 times its own forecast; Kansai Nerolac, 75.0% owned, was worth ₹148.7B, or ¥248.9B. The stake is ¥186.6B, 37% of the parent's value, from a subsidiary that reported FY3/2026 sales of ₹80.5B and net profit of ₹5.8B and describes itself as India's leader in industrial coatings. The gap in multiples here is narrower, and the parent carries businesses in Africa and Europe of its own, so this pair shows a milder version of the same effect.
Kubota and Escorts Kubota. Kubota, worth ¥3,150.8B, has owned control of Escorts since June 2022, when it went to 44.80% through an open offer and a subscription to new shares and the company was renamed; the stake is now 53.50% after the cancellation of shares held by a company trust. Escorts Kubota was worth ₹317.3B, or ¥531.1B, on 22.3 times; the stake is ¥284.2B, 9% of Kubota. India is small inside Kubota, and the pair illustrates the other side of the thesis: a Japanese company can carry an Indian tractor and construction-equipment franchise, priced by Mumbai at twice its own multiple, and the Tokyo price barely notices.
The gap persists for four reasons, none of which is a mispricing in the naive sense. First, index membership and investor base: the Japanese parent sits in TOPIX and is owned by Japanese pension funds, trust banks and households, whose benchmark for a carmaker is Toyota, and the Indian subsidiary sits in the Nifty and is owned by Indian mutual funds whose benchmark is Indian growth; neither set of owners is pricing the other's market. Second, the holding-company discount: a minority stake in a listed subsidiary cannot be sold or borrowed against without a discount, the dividends leak through Indian withholding tax, and the parent's own capital allocation sits between the investor and the asset. Third, currency: a yen investor in Suzuki is short the rupee against the yen on the Indian portion of earnings, and the rupee has depreciated against most currencies for decades, so part of the discount is a currency view. Fourth, consolidation itself hides the picture: Suzuki's reported revenue and profit already include Maruti in full, so a screen of Suzuki's own multiple shows a cheap Japanese carmaker and never shows an expensive Indian one inside it.
None of those reasons is permanent. The Tokyo Stock Exchange's campaign since 2023 on price-to-book and cost of capital has forced Japanese boards to explain conglomerate structures, and a listed subsidiary at twice the parent's multiple is the first thing an activist letter will mention. Indian withholding is a cost that can be modelled. The currency argument cuts both ways when Indian nominal growth runs at three times Japanese. And the Indian subsidiaries are growing into the parents: Maruti's ₹1,833B of FY3/2026 sales is about ¥3,069B of Suzuki's ¥6,290B trailing revenue, roughly half of the group. The arbitrage is unspoken because the two investor bases do not read each other's filings. It closes, if it closes, when one of them starts.
What the last two years of filings show
The second half of this piece is the evidence: every timely disclosure filed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange from 31 July 2024 to 27 August 2026 whose subject was India, read one by one. 45 notices from 34 listed Japanese companies, 41 dissected from the original PDF and 33 cross-read against the companies' annual reports: the formation wave, the six purchases of Indian businesses including a listed one bought at 31 times earnings, the one write-down, the schedule slips, who was already in India and who arrived this year, the full company table with tickers, the timeline, and the dated markers to watch next.
Views are the author's own. Every figure is dated in the text; prices and multiples are from the exchanges on the dates stated and move daily. Model outputs are arithmetic on public filings, never advice.