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“Despite Japan’s aging population and mounting public debt, the country offers a host of investment opportunities, according to Katie Koch, co-head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s (GSAM) Fundamental Equity business. Koch recently returned from GSAM’s annual Investor Tour, held this year in Tokyo and Kyoto, where the team hosted 20 CEOs, CIOs and heads of equity from large global institutions along with Japanese policy makers, government officials and C-suite executives….”
“Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS) will conduct a 3-day international seminar with Said Business School, University of Oxford, Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) and University of British Columbia (UBC) by Core-to-Core Program of JSPS. A 3-session symposium for invitees will be held on the first day, while the second and third day will be roundtable discussion on the evolving diversity of corporate governance in Europe and emerging countries in Asia. The purposes of this seminar are to wrap up the past research activities and to explore new issues to be challenged….”
ACGA submitted a letter to the Ministry of Finance (MOF) in Japan to express their deep concerns about the direction and substance of recently proposed amendments to the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act (FEFTA). They said “If passed, this would cut the threshold for mandatory pre-reporting of foreign investments in restricted sectors from 10% […]
Stock prices closed higher amid low trading volume. TOPIX and JPX400 market indices rose 0.26% and 0.27% respectively from the end of the previous month. CG Top 20 stocks slightly underperformed against the both indices, closed up by 0.16% in September.
We have been observing that life cycles of the companies are shortening every 5 years. The visionary companies are time tested and standing tall and withstanding the headwinds and adversaries in the journey of the Company Life Cycle of even 100 years! Who are such visionary companies? What they do and How they do? What is that core substance which get them glued from “Top to Bottom” with the same mission? How a company can be distinguished as a “VISIONARY COMPANY” from other peer following company?
On September 13th, BDTI held its English Director Boot Camp , attended by a number of highly experienced participants. Participants from various companies heard lectures about corporate governance by Nicholas Benes and Andrew Silberman of AMT, and exchanged experiences and opinions at a spacious, comfortable room kindly donated for our use by Cosmo Public Relations, a leading communications and PR firm in Tokyo.
While overseas investors’ ownership decreased a year ago, activist investors are now likely to focus on Japanese companies. Corporate governance in Japan has improved since the Corporate Governance Code was introduced in June of 2015, but progress is much slower than foreign investors hoped. At this time, we analyze the relationship between % ownership held by overseas investors and key governance criteria. The following table shows the result of our regression analysis of the 13 governance factors that METRICAL uses as criteria and two performance measures, ROE and ROA. Of the 15 factors, 14 factors are significantly correlated with level of ownership by overseas investors.
Executive Summary
More than a quarter of assets under management (AUM) worldwide are invested in “sustainable” strategies, strategies that consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in pursuit of financial sustainability and/or environmental or social sustainability. Investors – both individual and institutional and at all wealth levels – are increasingly interested in integrating these strategies into their financial plans and investment portfolios, and asset managers and global financial institutions are embracing the approach and expanding related services and product offerings.
Interest in sustainable investing and sustainably invested AUM are growing rapidly in Japan. But despite this enthusiasm and growth, few mainstream investors, financial advisors, and investment consultants in Japan are embracing the practice.
When you squint closely at the facts, not as much as you might think. Mostly, it is the difference between individual self-dealing and collective self-dealing.
As corporate policy, many Japanese companies re-hire their executive directors as “advisors (“sodanyaku” or “komon“) immediately after they retire from the board. The re-hiring occurs automatically, and the work expected from such “advisors” in their contracts (if any) is usually vague to the point of being non-existent.
This paper was originally published by Zeitschrift für Japanisches Recht (Journal of Japanese Law) in its 2019 Spring edition (Vol.24). It is reproduced here by kind permission of the Executive Editors.
SUMMARY
“In 2014–2015 Japan implemented a series of reforms to its corporate governance regime. The principal measures adopted were the country’s first Corporate Governance Code, revisions to its Companies Law, and a Stewardship Code, together with a report (the Itō Review) on corporate competitiveness and incentives for growth. In this paper we analyse the objectives of these reforms and make an assessment of their likely success.