Raw Japan
Slices of Japanese business, politics and life
from Summit Notebook:
Nomura: Lehman taking shape
Nomura's takeover of Lehman Brothers' European and Asia businesses is yielding results, and concerns the Japanese bank will struggle to marry cultures is misplaced, according to the man who drove the deal.
"It's a very successful start and we've been happy with what we've got," Takumi Shibata, chief operating officer for Nomura, told the Reuters Japan Investment Summit in Tokyo.
"We are finding surprisingly little differences between Lehman in Asia and Europe and Nomura in Asia and Europe. It was a marriage of two multicultural organisations, and both Lehman Brothers and Nomura aspire to be houses with a collegiate culture."
Nomura had kept most of the Lehman staff it wanted to, has learnt from past international expansion mistakes, and was winning back business lost in the aftermath of the deal, he said.
Japan recruiting scene goes pink
Tokyo’s first Pink Slip Party, held this week in the Roppongi Hills complex that used to house Lehman Brothers’ Japan operations, was certainly a success in terms of the number of media organisations that showed up. But whether the event, based on the Wall Street gatherings where laid-off bankers and recruiters network over drinks, worked by Japanese cultural standards was a little hard to tell.
In Japan’s conservative recruitment culture, you don’t usually hear people openly admitting to having been “restructured” out of a job, even amid the current financial crisis.
