Deutsche Bank Hires Daiwa's Muraki to Expand Coverage of Japan Brokerages

Deutsche Bank AG said it will hire brokerage analyst Masao Muraki from Daiwa Securities Group Inc. as Germany’s largest lender expands equity coverage in Japan.
Muraki, 34, will join Deutsche Securities Inc. from Daiwa Securities Capital Markets Co. on Sept. 1 as a director covering Japanese securities firms and insurers, said Orlando Faulks, head of global markets research in Japan at Deutsche Securities.
The firm is adding 92 companies over the next 12 months to the 224 stocks it covers now, Faulks said. Muraki was rated the best analyst of the brokerage and insurance industries in Japan by the Nikkei Veritas newspaper for the past three years.
“We want to be the top foreign broker in Japan research,” Faulks said in an interview.
BNP Paribas SA, France’s biggest bank, in April hired more than 20 employees from KBC Groep NV in Tokyo, including analysts and equity sales traders. Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch & Co. plans to boost equity research in Japan to 360 companies from 318 by Dec. 31, adding firms in the automobile, pharmaceutical, Internet and transportation industries.
Muraki joined Daiwa in 1999 after graduating from Keio University. He worked for Daiwa in the U.S. from 2001 to 2005, covering banks, investment banks and insurers. Kenichi Kanda, a spokesman for Daiwa in Tokyo, declined to comment.
Deutsche Bank this year hired Yoji Otani as a real estate analyst, and Takashi Moriwaki to cover auto parts makers, Faulks said.
Economic Rankings
Japan on Aug. 16 reported its economy expanded an annualized 0.4 percent in the three months ended June 30, falling short of all 19 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey and pushing it into third place behind the U.S. and China in terms of gross domestic product for the period.
“Deutsche Bank sees Japan as a very important market whether it’s the No. 2 economy or No. 3,” Brandon Ginsberg, the company’s head of equities for Japan, said in an interview. “It is still a powerhouse, a massive economy, with one of the largest pools of savings in the world.”
Deutsche Bank also hired four former Merrill Lynch investment bankers in May to add corporate restructuring to its advisory business.
Deutsche Securities in Japan had 2.3 billion yen ($27 million) of profit for the year ended March 31, compared with a loss of 43.8 billion yen a year earlier, according to its financial reports. The number of staff at the firm in Japan declined to 949 from 1,048 over the year.