TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s Norinchukin Bank expects to record a loss of approximately 1.9 trillion yen ($12.66 billion) in the year to March 2025 and its CEO, Kazuto Oku, will step down to take responsibility, it said on Thursday.
Norinchukin’s portfolio of overseas government bonds crashed in value as interest rates in Europe and the U.S. stayed higher for longer than expected. In June last year it said it would sell down $63 billion worth of these bonds to stem the losses.
Oku will be replaced by chief financial officer Taro Kitabayashi and the bank will establish a new financial strategy committee that reports to Kitabayashi to guard against losses of this scale in the future.
It has forecast a modest profit of between 30 and 70 billion yen in the year to March 2026 on new investments and rising interest rates in Japan.
Norinchukin is Japan’s main financial institution for farm, forestry and fishery cooperatives and is one of the country’s largest institutional investors, primarily generating profit from securities investments rather than from lending.
Its market investment portfolio totals 45.2 trillion yen, down from 56.3 trillion yen at the end of March 2024.
($1 = 150.0700 yen)
(Reporting by Anton Bridge and Miho Uranaka.; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)
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