Kunihiko Kanno Credit Suisse The buy side says: “He is tops in traditional, fundamental, bottom-up research.”

“Comprehensive coverage, including careful channel checks,” as one alliterative buy-side backer puts it, helps propel Credit Suisse analyst Kunihiko Kanno up two notches to the top of the roster for the first time. In October, Kanno upgraded Seiko Epson Corp. from neutral to outperform, at ¥1,265, on rallying international demand for its printers, scanners, projectors and quartz clocks, among other products. Shares of the Nagano-­based manufacturer catapulted as high as ¥1,534 in January, a 21.3 percent increase, before slipping to ¥1,367 by the end of February, for a gain of 8.1 percent since the upgrade that outperformed the sector by 1.8 percentage points. Kanno, 35, holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing that he earned in 1998 at ­Harrogate, Tennessee’s ­Lincoln Memorial University; he joined Credit Suisse as a junior technology analyst in 2001 after serving as a sales rep for a Japanese semiconductor-­materials supplier.

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