Every morning, Japan’s most influential business daily, the Nikkei, supplies its 3 million readers with a host of market-moving news — from earnings to acquisitions — with crystal-ball-like accuracy.
Stocks rise and fall on the Nikkei’s reports about Japan Inc, which are treated like gospel when trading on the world’s second-biggest equities market.
However, the consistently on-the-mark news has riled overseas investors, who say it gives their Japanese counterparts an unfair home advantage being many time zones ahead, and sparked calls for changes in legislation to provide a level playing field.
Photo: AFP
When the Nikkei’s unsourced reports say Toyota Motor Corp is going to triple production of fuel-cell cars, Sony Corp will cut 1,000 jobs or that Skymark Airlines is going bust, investors pounce on the news as though it came from the companies themselves.
And weeks before firms report their quarterly financial results, the Nikkei rolls out figures that are so accurate they often beat analysts’ forecasts. A predictable pattern follows: companies deny supplying the information or reject it outright, and say “it’s not something we’ve announced,” only to confirm it days, weeks or months later.
Skeptics are convinced it could only be insiders providing such accurate information, a practice that is far more rare in other major markets such as New York or London.
An earlier analysis by Bloomberg News, which competes with the Nikkei, found that of 45 articles analyzed that contained profit figures that preceded the formal release of results, 37 gave a number that was within 10 percent of the company’s result, or predicted a range that turned out to be correct.
They beat analysts’ estimates in 61 percent of cases.
“If the articles are wrong, investors are surprised and wonder why, but they don’t doubt the stories in general,” Myojo Asset Management chief executive officer Makoto Kikuchi said. “When they’re wrong, it may be because the information from the company is old, or the person leaking it didn’t have all the info.”
In response to questions about the Nikkei’s astonishing accuracy, the paper told AFP that “we don’t reveal how we investigate stories.”
For its part, the Tokyo Stock Exchange says it is powerless to do anything unless there is proof of insider trading.
“All we can do is to ask companies to make [information] public as soon as possible,” a bourse spokesman said.
Other media are left bemused about where the Nikkei got its information while US and European investors complain it leaves them out in the cold, unable to immediately access the Japanese-language breaking news — despite more than half of Tokyo’s trading being done by foreigners.
“But nobody here seems to think it’s a bad thing,” says Nicholas Smith, a Japan strategist for brokerage CLSA, who calls the Nikkei reports a “pervasive and perennial problem.”
He said the practice was not likely to disappear, even as it does little to bolster the case for investing in Japanese firms.
“The [regulators] should strengthen the legislation around fair disclosure and it has to be rigorously enforced,” he said. “Japan has never managed to create a market culture — and there is still a lot of suspicion about how [the market] functions.”
Rules about firms disseminating information as widely as possible only date from 1999 in Japan, and a former chief of a large firm said companies sometimes confirm information collected by an army of Nikkei reporters, who hold regular meetings with company executives.
“This is THE newspaper of record so giving the information isn’t considered a leak,” he said.
The practice remains in place despite Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s attempts to lure more foreign investors as part of a wider bid to kickstart Japan’s long-tepid economy.
Among the measures is a pledge to shake up the country’s governance standards, including mandating that more independent directors sit on companies’ boards.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the