Company history

The house began in 1872, when Nomura Tokushichi I opened a money-changing shop in Osaka. It changed coin and dealt in old gold and silver; shares and bonds were a sideline, and the founder’s safety-first temperament kept that sideline small. The break came in early 1904, when his son Nomura Tokushichi II inherited the business, abandoned money changing outright and restarted with ¥20,000 as a full securities dealer. Within a few years the firm was the strongest house in Osaka.

What the second Tokushichi built first was not a trading book but the machinery for reading the market. In April 1906 he set up a research department and began publishing a daily market bulletin — the first in the industry — that carried the previous day’s prices with analysis attached. Its hundredth issue set out the principle plainly: the customer’s interest before the firm’s own, and a duty to investigate how each company is organised, how it is trading and where it is going, along with overseas economies and the state’s finances. The reputation of Nomura as the research house was already formed.

The reading was tested around the Russo-Japanese War: Nomura rode the post-war share boom, then turned seller into the reaction that followed and made its name — “Nomura the seller” — before switching to the bull side in the First World War and accumulating a fortune. Trading both directions on the strength of its own information became the habit of the firm. Growth forced a change of form, and in December 1917 the shop was reorganised as a joint-stock company, Nomura Shoten, with capital of ¥5m. That company, however, is not the direct ancestor of Nomura Securities: renamed Osakaya Shoten in 1923, it was cut to ¥500,000 of capital in the 1930 financial panic and separated from the Nomura family, its shares passing to its own officers and staff. The securities line came instead out of the other company the second Tokushichi founded — a bank.

In 1918 the second Tokushichi founded Osaka Nomura Bank. Society was cool about a stock-shop man opening a bank, so he gave it a character of its own: alongside ordinary banking, securities finance, underwriting and lending to smaller firms. To run that side he hired Kataoka Ongo from the Industrial Bank of Japan — the man who would become the first president of Nomura Securities. When government-bond markets opened at the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges in 1920 and the bank qualified as a JGB broker, it set up an in-house bond department run on separate accounts from the first day, deliberately built so that it could be cut loose whenever the moment came.

That moment came in December 1925. From January 1926 the department traded as a stand-alone bond-only house with ¥5m of capital (¥2.5m paid in), Kataoka as president and a total staff of eighty-four. So complete was the commitment that “Nomura Bond House” was the leading candidate for the name. A New York representative office followed in March 1927 — profitable within three years — and through the re-embargo on gold exports in December 1931 and the cheap-money years to 1934 Nomura dominated foreign-bond dealing, until capital-flight and foreign-exchange control laws left it nothing to trade and the office closed at the end of 1936.

The cost of standing on one leg showed in 1937, when wartime inflation lifted equities and flattened the bond market, pushing Nomura’s bond underwriting and turnover to the worst level since its founding. Kataoka broke the deadlock with a single remark — “I never said doing equities was bad” — and in August 1937 an equity section was formed, staffed by Okumura Tsunao, Kitaura Kiichiro and Segawa Minoru, three future presidents in one new unit. Nomura entered on spot trades rather than the fashionable clearing trades, and on a no-stock principle: hold no inventory of its own, earn commissions only — a latecomer competing on prudence. The same instinct produced Japan’s first investment trust in November 1941, born of a Finance Ministry request to soak up wartime purchasing power and steady share prices. Because the product carried no guaranteed principal, Nomura offered to cover 20% of any loss on a ¥500 unit at redemption; the holding company’s board rejected the scheme eight votes to two, fearing that a securities arm unable to pay could trigger a run on the group’s bank, and only national pressure carried it through. By August 1944 Nomura had set ¥250m of trusts — about half the industry’s total.

Defeat cost Nomura its first loss since founding, every overseas asset from Manchuria to Keijo, and more than half its branches to fire. With no real work to do, staff sold lottery tickets from desks set up on street corners — an experience that would later become the template for selling shares to households. The occupation then replaced the management itself: designated a restricted company in November 1945 and caught by the purge in January 1947, Nomura lost its president and three directors in August 1947 and sat with the presidency vacant for some nine months until Okumura Tsunao took it in April 1948. Head office moved from Osaka to Tokyo in December 1946; the firm registered under the new Securities and Exchange Act in 1948 and became a regular member of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in April 1949.

The post-war programme was “securities democratisation” — a life with shares in every household — and it fitted a firm that had started in bonds, preferred spot trades and led in investment trusts. Its branch network had burned, so in 1947, while rivals were shedding surplus staff, Nomura hired graduates in bulk and opened counters inside department stores where the crowds already were. Investment advice offices ran in nineteen cities, women’s savings courses drew over ten thousand attendees, and a “million-ryo money box” shaped like an Edo-period cash chest went from 934 units in its first 1953 distribution to more than a million by 1962, collecting ¥11bn along the way. Research doubled as marketing: from January 1955 the firm opened its analysts’ work to the public in a stock forum whose first forecast proved right. Talks with Merrill Lynch went nowhere, and rather than seek a partner Nomura opened its own New York branch in March 1953, sixteen years after the pre-war office closed.

That footing produced the era’s emblematic deal. Asked in 1960 which Japanese company could raise money in America, a visiting US underwriter answered that none could — except one, and it was too small. The company was Sony, and Segawa Minoru moved on it at once; in June 1961 Sony became Japan’s first American Depositary Receipt, priced at $17.50 with Nomura and Smith Barney leading thirty-one underwriters for $3.5m, after a first-ever exercise in preparing consolidated accounts for the SEC. Nomura listed its own shares that October. Then the market broke: the 1965 crisis took down Sanyo Special Steel with ¥46bn of debt, drove the Nikkei Dow to ¥1,115 by April, and left Yamaichi Securities — heavily dependent on proprietary trading and the most indebted of the big four — unable to fund itself. When a newspaper outside the Finance Ministry’s reporting truce broke the story on 21 May, customers ran the counters, and on 28 May the Bank of Japan lent Yamaichi $66.7M (¥24bn) under Article 25 — the first unsecured, unlimited special loan ever made to a single private company. Nomura came through the same slump profitably, its commission income rising from ¥19.2bn in the year to September 1961 to ¥19.8bn in the year to September 1965 while its underwriting screening committee kept turning down paper it did not like — the caution learned in bonds showing up as the difference between houses. The years that followed built on that base: the research department was spun out as Nomura Research Institute in 1965, licensing replaced registration in 1968, and the great wave of JGB issuance from 1975 — public offerings jumping from ¥1.79tn to ¥4.51tn in a year — was met with a company-wide retail push that lifted Nomura’s share of dealer underwriting past 40%.

Through the 1980s Nomura converted its overseas presence from representative offices into operating subsidiaries: Nomura International in London in March 1981, an NYSE seat for Nomura Securities International that July, then regional holding companies — Nomura Holding America in New York in 1989 and Nomura Asia Holding N.V. in Amsterdam in February 1990. By the turn of the decade the firm had the three-pole structure, Japan, Europe and the Americas, that its global ambition required.

Then the market it dominated turned. After the Nikkei peaked at 38,915 at the end of 1989, the industry practice of quietly reimbursing large clients’ trading losses surfaced in 1991, and the largest house was its epicentre. President Tabuchi Yoshihisa and chairman Tabuchi Setsuya resigned; their successor, Sakamaki Hideo, proclaimed a “New Nomura” built not on a new strategy but on the founding creed of prospering together with the customer, and on a securities firm willing to say no. The regulatory answer was structural: ex-post compensation was outlawed in 1991 and the Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission was created in July 1992.

Six years after that declaration Nomura fell in the same place. On 25 March 1997 prosecutors and the SESC raided the firm together, and the case that emerged — compensation and profit-sharing arranged by four officers including the sitting president, and ¥320m in cash paid to a corporate racketeer — showed how little the language of renewal had reached the floor. Sakamaki resigned; Ujiie Junichi took over on the premise that another scandal would end the company, and faced a suspension of equity businesses that August and a consolidated net loss of $2.0B (¥243bn) for the year to March 1997. This time the response reached the shape of the institution: in October 2001 the securities business was hived off into a subsidiary and the parent became Nomura Holdings, listing in New York that December, with a committee-based board following in 2003.

Domestic pre-eminence eroded as deregulation did its work. In 2004, when Toshiba raised equity for the first time in fifteen years, it named Mizuho Securities joint lead alongside Nomura — the first time a bank-affiliated house had stood beside the traditional big three on a deal of that size. Bank counters, allowed to sell investment trusts from 1998, held about half of all equity-trust balances within five years, and online brokers took roughly 60% of individual share turnover. Nomura’s record profit of $2.6B (¥304bn) for the year to March 2006 turned out to be the last of the pre-subprime market; two years later it posted a loss, and in April 2008 Watanabe Kenichi became group CEO with a mandate to break the defensive rigidity of the previous decade.

Five months later Lehman Brothers failed, and Nomura moved inside a week: the Asia-Pacific business announced on 22 September 2008, Europe and the Middle East on the 23rd, employment transferred in October. It assumed no assets or liabilities — beyond a few tens of billions of yen for equipment and the IT and settlement subsidiaries the price was effectively zero — because what it was buying was 8,150 people and their local networks, Barclays having already taken North America. It was the right read of what an investment bank actually consists of, and it came with a bill: retention guarantees written to stop those people leaving raised the group’s breakeven permanently, and the year to March 2009 closed with a net loss of $7.6B (¥708bn). The organisation bent towards its acquisition — English in any meeting with a non-Japanese present, a globally benchmarked staff track with variable pay — yet ten of the eleven seats on the executive committee stayed with Nomura lifers even as the wholesale floor was run largely by ex-Lehman managers.

What followed was a long argument with that structure. Under Nagai Koji from 2012 pretax profit recovered to ¥237.7bn and then ¥361.6bn, but overseas volatility kept returning, and the year to March 2019 brought a second annual loss in a decade. In April 2019 Nomura closed or merged more than thirty of its 156 domestic branches and set out to cut ¥140bn of costs in three years, converting the door-to-door, cold-calling model that had defined it since the democratisation campaign into wealth management — a shift Okuda Kentaro, CEO from 2020, carried through to renaming the division in April 2024. Abroad he narrowed the ambition frankly: Nomura does not expect to beat the big American firms in every field, and concentrates instead on equity derivatives and structured real-estate products. Profit followed — $2.3B (¥341bn) for the year to March 2025, beating the 2006 record, and more again the year after — and in April 2025 the firm agreed to buy Macquarie’s US and European public asset-management business for about $1.8bn, adding roughly $180bn of assets under management and swapping an overseas engine that bets on markets through people for one that earns fees on assets it holds.