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 operated in 13 countries and regions at the end of June and oversaw $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 CEO, at an event. She said the asset manager¡¯s global growth plan seeks to ¡°expand our business both organically ¡ª that means using our existing resources ¡ª 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 identities, pre-mergers and acquisitions. 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.
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