Nomura Holdings Inc unveiled plans to cut US$1 billion of costs at its struggling wholesale business, as Japan’s largest securities firm embarks on yet another sweeping overhaul of its international operations.
The company did not give specifics on job cuts as it presented the effort to investors yesterday after the market close in Tokyo.
However, the axe has already begun to fall, with about 100 positions being culled in Europe, the Middle East and Africa on top of reductions in Hong Kong and Singapore, people with knowledge of the matter said.
“To restart this company” as a new Nomura, “I have to commit myself to proceeding quickly with efforts to build a muscular base,” Nomura chief executive officer Koji Nagai told investors.
“We realized that as long as we continue with the way we have done business thus far, Nomura won’t be able to get itself out of the current situation,” he said.
Nagai’s comments, along with the ambitious cost-cutting target, amount to a tacit acknowledgment that Nomura’s years of stop-start international expansions have largely been fruitless. Operations outside Japan have lost money for four straight quarters, with Europe a leading headache for Nagai.
The job cuts in Europe would mostly target rates and credit traders in London, one of the people said, asking not to be identified as the numbers are not public.
Eight out of nine employees in the Singapore equity research operation have been let go, the people said.
Nomura also cut at least 10 jobs at its equities business in Hong Kong, one of the people said.
Nomura said it would “right-size” its wholesale business, which is made up of investment banking and global markets divisions.
Most of the wholesale cost cuts would be completed by March next year, it said.
The company also said it would eliminate at least 30 of its 156 retail brokerage branches dotted across Japan.
Nagai commissioned the review in January after the bank posted its biggest quarterly loss since the global financial crisis, thanks partly to a goodwill writedown on its 2008 acquisition of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc assets — the deal that hobbled the bank’s European operations.
Nomura also said it would simplify its corporate structure by reducing the number of functions by half. Excluding the internal audit team, Nomura has 10 corporate areas ranging from finance to risk management and compliance. These are to be streamlined into five to avoid duplication and reduce costs.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, surpassing the US$600 billion mark for the first time, the central bank said yesterday. Last month, the country’s foreign exchange reserves rose US$5.51 billion from a month earlier to reach US$602.94 billion due to an increase in returns from the central bank’s portfolio management, the movement of other foreign currencies in the portfolio against the US dollar and the bank’s efforts to smooth the volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民)said a rate cut cycle launched by the US Federal Reserve
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
Pegatron Corp (和碩), a key assembler of Apple Inc’s iPhones, on Thursday reported a 12.3 percent year-on-year decline in revenue for last quarter to NT$257.86 billion (US$8.44 billion), but it expects revenue to improve in the second half on traditional holiday demand. The fourth quarter is usually the peak season for its communications products, a company official said on condition of anonymity. As Apple released its new iPhone 17 series early last month, sales in the communications segment rose sequentially last month, the official said. Shipments to Apple have been stable and in line with earlier expectations, they said. Pegatron shipped 2.4 million notebook
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
RSS