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Masaya Yamasaki
Nomura Securities Co.
"His understanding of sector positioning and the fundamentals is much better than other analysts'"
For a third consecutive year, Nomura Securities Co.’s Masaya Yamasaki tops the roster. For fiscal 2013, which began April 1, the 44-year-old believes profits will beat the previous cycle’s 2007 peak, driven by restructuring efforts and an inventory recovery. The group will also benefit from two major growth areas: cloud computing, where storage solutions are key for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets; and power management, which applies to generation, consumption and control systems. Against this backdrop, Yamasaki is counseling clients to buy Tokyo-based Toshiba Corp., a maker of NAND flash memory as well as power adapters and supplies, and Mitsubishi Electric Corp., because it is concentrating on factory-automation systems and power device segments. “I expect those businesses will recover gradually going forward,” he explains. Yamasaki “can always be relied upon to focus on the fundamentals,” declares one investor. — Carolyn Koo