Japanese banks to speed up sales of stock portfolios

Major Japanese banks will speed up the pace of sales of their stock portfolios in an attempt to improve their finances, a newspaper said Sunday.
Combined shareholdings of the nation's five biggest banking groups will be halved to 10 trillion yen (billion dollars) by March 2005 from March 2002, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.
The Japanese government, concerned about mounting bad debts held by the banks, is demanding they keep the value of shareholdings within that of their core capital by the end of September 2006.
The five groups have so far said they would meet the demands at the end of the current year ending March 2004.
But they have now decided on further sales of shareholdings - whose appraisal losses have been a major burden on their finances along with bad loans, the daily said.
UFJ Holdings Inc. is set to sell off 700 billion yen in shareholdings by the end of March 2005, three years earlier than planned, it said.
The step is to lower the value of UFJ's stock portfolio - excluding shares acquired in exchange for a capital infusion into troubled corporate borrowers - to some one trillion yen in March 2005, down 40 percent from the end of September 2003.
Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc. had planned to sell 700 billion yen worth of shares for the year to March 2004, but has now decided to raise the target as it already sold off 560 billion yen worth in the first half, the daily said.