For reference purposes, here are three more recent interviews with David Baran of the Tokyo-based Symphony Fund, which is involved in shareholder activism and management buyouts of undervalued (especially net-net and net cash bargain) Japanese equities:
- Investment In Japan interview with David Baran (includes a list of websites that may be helpful for finding info on companies in Japan)
- FINAlternatives Q&A with David Baran
- Hedge Funds Review interview with David Baran
Investing in a ZIRP environment:
I’ve been trading Japanese equities since 1990, so I’ve seen it all twice [laughs]…
I think [it’s influenced] our views on how the world is going to look as a result of, not just the current sovereign debt crisis in Europe, but the entire cycle of over-leveraging in the world and the shifting to an almost perpetual low interest rate, low growth scenario. We’ve lived it in Japan already—we know what it’s like, we know what it does to asset prices, we know you’re going to get attractive bull market runs but you’re still going to be in a long-term bear market. Being able to look back at our own experiences of having dealt with that in Japan gives us a completely different perspective, I think, from other managers who would be relatively new to the market—by relatively new, I mean, they’ve got 10 years experience—and they’ve only seen bull markets with some deep corrections that are reversed by policy.
I don’t think there’s a policy solution for what we have now. You’ve got to get rid of all the debt. The global debt overhang is huge, it’s historic. The amount of unfunded liability in the U.S. can cripple the country. And you have that situation amplified in Europe with fewer policy tools to rectify the problem.
The M&A trend in Japan:
MBOs [management buyouts] first came to prominence in Japan in 2006 with the Skylark MBO. This caused corporate Japan to first sit up and take notice that this was a possible road that management could take. At the same time, there began a series of changes to Japanese corporate governance that aimed to increased corporate disclosure and increase transparency. The most recent of these came out in 2010 and included requirements for director/statutory auditor independence, disclosure of executive compensation, and explanations for cross shareholdings. All of these are hard to swallow for many Japanese companies. In addition, with all these new rules, including IFRS accounting rules that will soon be introduced, the costs of being a listed company was getting high. Too high particularly for smaller cap companies for whom these costs were now of a material size relative to earnings. It is no coincidence that we have seen a steady increase in MBO activity in Japan, with 2011 on track to be the highest in five years.
They’re not activists, they’re advisors:
We are not activists. The whole activist approach doesn’t work in Japan. It probably works better in the U.S. because the shareholder base is more diversified and economically motivated. Shareholders in Japan may not necessarily use the same formula. The activists who tried a hostile approach here before, and this is where the cultural biases come in, they never had the ability to force management to do anything because they never had control. So they were requesting management to do something but doing it in such a way that management would just turn their back on them and say, ‘Well, we don’t even really need to talk to you,’ and the other shareholders really didn’t care, and would side with management.
We take a much more cooperative approach with management…We’ll act more as their counsel, their consigliere, guys they can talk to about things as opposed to the squeaky wheel. We’re not interested in being the squeaky wheel.
A House Rises 