Nomura books $2.2 bn Q4 loss, hit by Lehman costs

TOKYO: Japan's top securities firm Nomura announced Friday a record 7.3-billion-dollar annual loss, stung by financial turmoil and the cost of buying large parts of failed Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers.

The poor performance underlined the deepening woes of Japan's financial giants, which were initially seen as relatively resilient to the fallout from the US-born credit crunch.

Nomura's net loss rose more than 10-fold to 709.4 billion yen (7.3 billion dollars) in the year to March from 67.85 billion yen the previous fiscal year.

The company said it had lost 150 billion yen from financial market trading and booked 230 billion yen in one-off costs, including those linked to its purchase of chunks of Lehman Brothers.

Eyeing a global presence, Nomura last year snapped up Lehman's operations in Asia, Europe and the Middle East after the investment bank became the most visible corporate casualty of the financial crisis.

Nomura has also been hurt by Iceland's financial implosion and exposure to an alleged vast fraud by Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff. It has moved to scale down, or exit, non-core businesses to reduce its costs.

In the fourth quarter alone, it logged a net loss of 217.1 billion yen, even worse than its year-earlier shortfall of 153.9 billion yen.

But the brokerage giant said it saw better times ahead.

"Last year we made significant progress in dealing with legacy risk assets and paving the way for future growth amid an extremely challenging market environment," Nomura president Kenichi Watanabe said.

"We are now focused on returning to profitability," he added.

As usual, Nomura gave no financial forecasts for the current year.