TOKYO (AFP) — Top Japanese brokerage group Nomura Holdings Inc. confirmed on Monday that it had won a deal to buy all Asian operations of collapsed US investment firm Lehman Brothers.
Nomura Holdings said it would offer employment to all 3,000 Lehman Brothers' workers in Asia.
"We see immediate strategic benefits, delivering the scale and scope to realise our vision to be a world-class investment bank," Kenichi Watanabe, Nomura's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.
Financial terms were not disclosed. The Wall Street Journal Asia reported that Nomura would pay 225 million dollars for Lehman's equities and investment banking operations across Asia, which includes Japan and Australia.
Nomura, which like many other Japanese financial institutions has recovered from a bad loan crisis in the 1990s, has been seeking ways to expand overseas.
Nomura had been weighing a deal with Lehman before the 150-year-old firm collapsed and filed for bankruptcy last week as the most high-profile victim of a worldwide credit crisis.
"Our ability to capitalise on this opportunity in spite of such volatile markets reflects our financial strength and demonstrates how well we have managed the credit crisis," Watanabe said.
British financial leaders Standard Chartered PLC and Barclays PLC had also reported to be bidding for Lehman Brothers' Asian operations.
Barclays sealed a 1.75-billion-dollar deal to acquire Lehman's investment banking and trading units, which employ about 9,000 people in the United States, and a skyscraper that the bankrupt US firm occupied in Manhattan.
Last year, Nomura bought Instinet Inc., a US online brokerage firm, for 1.2 billion dollars as part of its effort to expand overseas.
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