Nomura gives 150% salary hike to its top executives as earnings boom

By Takashi Nakamichi and Nao Sano

Nomura Holdings Inc. more than doubled pay for its top managers last fiscal year, as earnings at Japan’s largest brokerage rebounded on booming domestic markets.
 

Total compensation paid to the firm’s eight executive officers rose 150 per cent in the year ended March 31 to 4.46 billion yen ($28.4 million), according to a recent notice for a planned annual shareholders general meeting next month. 

Chief Executive Officer Kentaro Okuda counts among that group as does Christopher Willcox, who oversees investment banking and trading. The figure includes stock awards as well as 1.21 billion yen in cash bonuses and 598 million yen in base salaries.

 

The total pay for Nomura’s top managers is the highest in at least a decade. While it is less than the individual compensation for some Wall Street chief executive officers, it rewards the firm’s leadership after working through a string of setbacks in recent years that kept profit subdued. Nomura last year saw its annual profit grow for the first time since Okuda took charge in 2020.

Okuda has sought to build out income streams outside of Nomura’s traditional strength in fixed-income trading, making forays into wealth management and private credit, in a bid to make profit more dependable. At the same time, he’s said Willcox’s wholesale business — which does trading and investment banking — needs to sustain growth based on “self-funding.”

Kentaro Okuda, CEO of Nomura (Photo: Bloomberg)

The moves come after the Japanese firm spent several years improving risk controls after losing almost $3 billion in 2021 on the collapse of investment firm Archegos Capital Management. 

Lately, Nomura’s turnaround has gotten a tailwind from Japan’s economic revival in investment banking and the retail brokerage. The firm has benefited from a domestic stock market rally that has seen investors flock to the nation’s equities and made companies more active in dealmaking.

Bond trading has also been one of the areas that’s seen a local boom as the Bank of Japan’s historic shift in monetary policy has helped revive volatility in the country’s roughly $7 trillion government bond market.