Nomura Said to Hire 40 Students as Global Bankers at Triple Pay
Nomura is bidding to prevent top students from choosing overseas firms such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that often offer higher salaries. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg
Nomura Holdings Inc., Japan’s biggest securities firm, offered jobs to 40 students at triple the normal starting salary under a new plan to strengthen its international business, two people involved in the hiring said.
The college recruits, chosen from 650 candidates, will take up positions in investment banking, trading and other departments starting next April, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information isn’t public. They’ll be guaranteed a 6.5 million yen ($75,000) salary before bonuses, compared with 2.4 million yen for regular hires.
Nomura is bidding to prevent top students from choosing overseas firms such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that often offer higher salaries. Investment-banking candidates under the new program were required to score more than 860 on the Test of English for International Communication.
Keiko Sugai, a Tokyo-based spokeswoman for Nomura, declined to comment.
The special pay packages match those offered by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. to graduates in Japan before its September 2008 bankruptcy. Nomura acquired Lehman’s Japanese and European units later that year. At least 12 senior former Lehman managers quit after Nomura paid out guaranteed bonuses in March.
Nomura plans to hire an additional 560 college graduates for the next fiscal year under the traditional recruitment system, paying them a salary of 2.4 million yen plus benefits including overtime, the people said. Employees who get the so- called “global banker” package won’t be compensated for working late hours, according to the firm’s recruitment adverts.
University Students
Japanese companies offer jobs to university students as early as a year before graduation. The academic year ends on March 31 and new recruits start work on the following day.
Nomura said today profit fell 80 percent to 2.3 billion yen in the first quarter on a slump in investment banking and trading. The brokerage posted a pretax loss for its overseas operations of 28.5 billion yen in the period, the biggest in five quarters.
A first-quarter earnings estimate survey of four analysts by Bloomberg News ranged from a profit of 2.2 billion yen to a loss of 3.8 billion yen. The company earned 11.4 billion yen in the year-earlier period.
To contact the reporter on this story: Takahiko Hyuga in Tokyo at thyuga@bloomberg.net
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