Nomura Holdings Inc. agreed to buy a 35 percent stake in the asset-management arm of India’s biggest life insurer, to expand sales in Asia’s third-largest economy.
“India is one of the fastest growing markets for asset management in Asia and is key to Nomura’s push to be the world- class asset-management firm,” Atsushi Yoshikawa, Nomura Asset Management’s chief executive officer, said in an e-mailed statement from Mumbai yesterday. The statement didn’t give financial details of the deal.
Nomura will pay about 6 billion yen ($65 million) for the holding in LIC Mutual Fund Asset Management Co., a unit of Life Insurance Corp. of India, the Nikkei newspaper reported, without saying where it obtained the information.
LIC Asset Management had 324 billion rupees ($6.6 billion) of average assets under management for the month of June 2009, compared with 186 billion rupees in the same month a year ago, according to the statement. Parent Life Insurance of India manages investments of 8,039 billion rupees, the statement said.
LIC Mutual aims to boost equity investments with Nomura’s help, while the brokerage will sell Indian funds to Japanese customers, Nikkei said.
Source: Bloomberg