Street smarts

1 February 2018 By Quentin Webb

The Tokyo-based bank’s latest results help explain why it’s stocking up on U.S. dealmakers. A 25 pct jump in earnings was buoyed by one-offs, and its dominant trading arm is sputtering. It’ll be tricky, though, to scale foreign M&A rankings and poach clients – even Japanese ones.

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Context News

Nomura, the Japanese investment bank, said on Feb. 1 that earnings for the three months to December increased 25 percent from a year earlier to 121 billion yen ($1.1 billion), on revenue that climbed 10 percent, to 407 billion yen.

The results also included various one-off items. Revenue from Nomura’s three operating divisions declined 4 percent year-on-year to 313 billion yen, while pre-tax earnings fell 24 percent to 66.2 billion yen.

The overall figures were bolstered by “other” revenue and pre-tax earnings totalling 89 billion yen and 50.4 billion yen, respectively. Nomura said this included 45 billion yen of income from “foreign-exchange translation adjustments” from winding up Nomura Capital Markets, a subsidiary covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Nomura said on Jan. 29 it had hired 15 senior bankers in the United States over the past 12 months in areas including mergers and acquisitions, leveraged finance and equity capital markets.

This has been corrected in the third paragraph of context news to show currency adjustments stem from winding up Nomura Capital Markets.

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