Nomura Asset Management Co, the fund management unit of Nomura Holdings Inc, said on June 09 it will seek opportunities to form capital alliances with foreign counterparts to grow faster overseas.
Nomura Asset, which said last week it would replace Fidelity as the investment manager for the Japan Fund, an independent US fund focusing on Japan, wants to gain sales networks faster and develop products more easily by forming alliances, Chief Executive Officer Atsushi Yoshikawa told Reuters in an interview.
"It's difficult for us to enter markets like China and India on our own. We may want to tie up with someone with distribution networks," Yoshikawa said. To gain a foothold in the United States, Nomura last week sealed an agreement with the Japan Fund, which it said is the world's oldest fund managing Japanese equities, to manage its assets, marking its full-scale entry into the US retail mutual fund market.
With the Japan Fund deal, Nomura aims to boost its US retail assets in the next three years by almost 17-fold to 500 billion yen ($4.75 billion) as it eyes further overseas expansion, Yoshikawa said.
The Japan Fund now has about 30 billion yen in assets under management. Nomura Asset, Japan's largest asset management company, wants to raise this to about 100 billion yen, Yoshikawa said. To achieve the 500 billion yen target, Nomura will add other funds, some of them possibly from outside Japan, he said.
Still, the US retail assets would be just a small part of Nomura's total assets under management, which it wants to raise to 43 trillion yen by March 2011. Nomura Asset managed 25.8 trillion yen as of March this year.