Sumito Takeda UBS The buy side says: “I greatly appreciate his insight on the industry from a long-term point of view.”

Sumito Takeda, 35, captures the crown for a second consecutive year. “His forecast of the industry’s future is so interesting and exciting — it’s as if I am hearing the strategy of an expert chess player,” marvels one portfolio manager. In June the UBS analyst — “a strong advocate for Internet structural movements,” in the words of another investor — highlighted his long-­standing buy recommendation on CyberAgent, Japan’s leading online advertising agency (as measured by annual sales), at ¥139,700, on the strong growth prospects of the Tokyo-­based company’s popular Ameba virtual world platform; in March 2010, CyberAgent announced that it was bringing the platform to the U.S. market via the ­Facebook social networking site. The stock had skyrocketed to ¥261,300 by the end of February, a phenomenal 87 percent advance that trounced the sector by 98 percentage points.

Polling and tabulation of data as well as reporting on the sector profiles were completed before the March 11 Tohoku earthquake.