Akihiro Murakami
Nomura Securities Co.
Newcomer Akihiro Murakami shoots straight in to second place. “Supply-demand conditions are one of the key issues for 2013,” the Nomura Securities Co. researcher contends. Overseas investors have been gobbling up Japanese equities since late last year, a trend that could be affected by the ongoing impact of the AIJ Investment Advisors Co. pension fraud scandal, he notes. (Kazuhiko Asakawa, president of the Tokyo-based money management firm, pleaded guilty in December to defrauding investors of nearly ¥25 billion [$263.3 million] in 17 pension funds.) Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced in September that it intends to abolish the employee pension fund system, but as of late March had not yet provided details or a time line for achieving its goal. “If the system is revamped, there could be major ramifications that cannot be ignored, such as vast amounts of pension assets being released onto the market,” Murakami says. “If investment in Japanese equities by nonresidents of this magnitude can be expected to continue, we think it would be sufficient to offset outflows of pension assets — as was the case in the period between 2002 and 2003, when the welfare pension portions of employee pension fund schemes were returned to the government.” However, the names Japanese pension funds own are not necessarily those that foreign investors want to buy. “My concern is the impact of future fund flows, focusing on the differences between nonresident investors’ and pension funds’ portfolios,” he explains. “Murakami-san is very good at talking about pretty complicated mathematical stuff in plain words,” observes one Tokyo-based client. “He always tries to be user-friendly by discussing the implications of theories and studies, rather than explaining theories and studies in too much detail.” — Thomas W. Johnson