TOKYO (Reuters) – Nomura Holdings Inc, Japan’s biggest brokerage and investment bank, reported on Tuesday its biggest quarterly net loss since the 2008 global financial crisis, taking a 245.7 billion yen ($2.3 billion) hit from the collapse of U.S. investment fund Archegos.
Its January-March net loss came in at 155.4 billion yen , versus a 34.48 billion yen loss a year earlier when global stock markets were battered by the coronavirus pandemic.
Before Archegos failed to meet margin calls on heavily leveraged stock bets last month, Nomura had been on track for record annual profit, bolstered by a buoyant U.S. trading business. That was set to have been a hard-fought victory in its decade-long, stop-start efforts to successfully expand outside Japan.
Instead, it posted a net profit of 153.1 billion yen, down 29% from the previous year. Most analysts had expected a profit of between 160 billion and 225 billion yen, according to Refinitiv data.
Nomura’s Archegos loss, which is slightly larger than the previously flagged $2 billion, is the second worst after Credit Suisse. The Swiss bank booked a 4.4 billion franc ($4.8 billion) Archegos hit in January-March and expects further losses of about 600 million francs this quarter.
Morgan Stanley lost nearly $1 billion, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Deutsche Bank exited them without losses, Reuters and other media outlets have reported.
($1 = 108.2300 yen)
(Reporting by Makiko Yamazaki and Takashi Umekawa; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Edwina Gibbs)
