Takumi Shibata, Sadeq Sayeed: Nomura comes out fighting

A year after acquiring Lehman Brothers’ Asian and European businesses, Nomura says it is halfway to building a global investment bank. Few people outside the firm think it will succeed. To some, it is already the ‘other Lehman takeover’. But Nomura’s leaders are determined to win the battle. Lawrence White and Helen Avery report.

IT IS AN accident of timing, a Nomura spokeswoman assures Euromoney as we enter the elevators in the Japanese firm’s Tokyo headquarters that our meetings with senior management are scheduled for September 15. That makes it one year to the day since Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US. Nomura prefers to think about September 22, she says, when it announced that it would be buying Lehman’s Asian operations. The next day Nomura snapped up the failed US bank’s European investment banking and equities business for a nominal fee of $2.

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