The Japanese government is set to raise ￥416 billion (US$4 billion) from the initial share sale of state-owned Kyushu Railway Co after pricing the stock at the top end of a marketed range.
The shares are to be sold at ￥2,600 each, compared with the ￥2,400 to ￥2,600 range offered, according to a filing yesterday.
Japan is selling all 160 million shares held by Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency, which fully owns JR Kyushu.
The initial public offering (IPO), set to be the world’s third-biggest this year, is part of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to encourage people to invest some of their ￥1,700 trillion household savings in the stock market.
JR Kyushu’s initial public offering follows debuts in the 1990s by East Japan Railway Co and Central Japan Railway Co after the breakup of state-run Japan Railways in 1987.
Shares of JR Kyushu, which operates bullet trains, hotels and restaurants on Japan’s Kyushu, are scheduled to be listed on Tuesday next week in Tokyo and the following day in Fukuoka.
Three-quarters of the shares are being sold domestically, with the rest offered to overseas investors. Japan aims to sell more than half the shares to individual investors and held eight of 10 investor presentations on Kyushu.
Nomura Holdings Inc, Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co and JPMorgan Chase & Co are global coordinators for the initial public offering, while SMBC Nikko Securities Inc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc are to lead the global offering.
JR Kyushu, which gets most of its profits from real estate and station-building businesses, is the fourth of the JR firms selling shares to the public. The shares are to list on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, one of five markets it operates and where most large companies are listed, according to the Japan Exchange Group.
The company has proposed a dividend of ￥37.5 for the six months through March and is offering fare discounts to potential investors to help boost demand for the offering. JR Kyushu predicts net income of ￥38.2 billion in the year ending March 31, with sales forecast to increase 0.2 percent to ￥379 billion.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS