‘Nikko’ cut from new name of US$260 billion Japanese asset manager

[TOKYO] Nikko Asset Management is changing its name to Amova Asset Management, removing “Nikko” for the first time since it was founded in 1959 in a sign the company is willing to leave familiar ground to expand globally.  

The new name of the Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group unit mashes together the words “asset management,” “move” and “nova,” Latin for “new”. The company oversees US$260.3 billion in assets.

The Tokyo-based company wanted the market to see that “we are not the firm from 65 years ago,” said Stefanie Drews, Amova’s chief executive officer, at an event. She said the asset manager’s global growth plan seeks to “expand our business both organically – that means using our existing resources – and inorganically, creating further strategic partnerships.”

Japan’s financial sector went through periods of major consolidation in about a decade and a half after the nation’s asset-market bubble collapsed in the early 1990’s. That prompted the biggest lenders to combine to survive in a tough market and get rid of their mountains of bad debt.

The high-pressure mergers and acquisitions often led banks to keep the relations between the consolidating firms vague, prompting some of the companies to come up with names that didn’t reflect their pre-M&A identities. Mizuho Financial Group, for example, united three firms including Industrial Bank of Japan, none of whose names contained “Mizuho,” a word for rice plants.       

Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group’s name, meantime, starts with “Mitsui Sumitomo” when written in Japanese, the same reversal that’s seen in the name of the financial group. BLOOMBERG