Business Strategy & Outlook
Mizuho Financial Group is one of Japan’s three largest banking groups, with a 6.9% share of domestic loans and 8.5% share of deposits as of March 2022. In Japan, the environment for banks has been tough for years and to remain so. A long-running deflationary environment in the country led to persistently low demand for loans, with the loan/deposit ratio having declined from 74% in 2000 to around 56% at present. The debt/equity ratio for Japan’s approximately 1 million business corporations declined from more than 2 times prior to the late 1990s to a reasonably healthy 0.66 times in 2019 as borrowers prioritized paying down existing debt rather than taking out new loans for investment, but credit costs may increase moderately in the coming years after many corporations increased their borrowing in 2020 and as the pandemic affected some firms’ business models. Mizuho expanded its overseas business quite rapidly in the first half of the past decade, with overseas loans rising from 12.6% of total loans in March 2011 to 29.4% by March 2016. Mizuho has since moderated the overseas growth in order to better manage risks and conserve capital, and overseas loans comprised 33.8% of total loans as of March 2022. Compared with its Japanese megabank rivals, which have taken control of local banks in the U.S. or Southeast Asia, Mizuho’s only such investment overseas is a 15% stake in Vietnam’s Vietcombank and a 7.5% stake in Vietnamese digital-payment firm M-Service. Almost all of its overseas operations are done through the main Mizuho entities (Mizuho Bank, Mizuho Trust, and Mizuho Securities). Mizuho also lacks the large consumer finance, credit card, and leasing operations of its two rivals, leaving it dependent on banking, securities and asset management alone for future returns. The need for massive expense reductions is thus even more important for Mizuho’s future profitability than it is for its two megabank rivals. However, the lack of existing businesses could ironically help Mizuho adapt more flexibly than its rivals if digitalization increasingly disrupts businesses such as credit card payments.
Financial Strengths
As of September 2022, Mizuho Financial Group’s common equity Tier 1 capital ratio was 11.4%, slightly below the average for global systemically important banks. Mizuho’s density of risk-weighted assets to total assets is also lower than that of many other G-SIBs, particularly those headquartered in the U.S., and its ratio of Tier 1 capital to total leverage exposure of 4.22% is well below the G-SIB average of around 6.0%. This presents a constraint on Mizuho’s ability to increase profits by expanding balance sheet size. Instead, the group has no choice but to improve efficiency with the current size of assets, or preferably with a smaller balance sheet. Mizuho’s liquidity coverage ratio of 126% compares with the G-SIB average of 134%. The LCR does not fully distinguish between currencies, and while Japanese banks’ yen liquidity is very strong, they depend on access to U.S. dollar funding for their large amount of U.S. dollar assets. Foreign-currency deposits of USD 227 billion covered 77% of Mizuho’s nonyen loans of USD 296 billion as of September 2022. For the remainder, Mizuho has issued large bonds in U.S. dollars and euros through the holding company, as well as bonds in CNY and AUD through Mizuho Bank.
Bulls Say
- Mizuho has outlined aggressive cost-cutting plans that could surprise market expectations to the upside.
- After years of system troubles and long delays in integrating its predecessor banks, Mizuho has left expectations at such a low level that there is room for upside surprise as long as the group just performs reasonably well.
- Mizuho’s lack of a strong consumer finance or credit card business could ironically help it adapt more flexibly to disruptive innovation in this area.
Company Description
Mizuho Financial Group is roughly tied with megabank peer Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group for the status as Japan’s second largest bank after Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. As of March 2021, Mizuho’s market share of domestic loans was 6.9%, compared with 7.0% for SMFG and 8.3% for MUFG. In Japan, Mizuho has more of a corporate focus than SMFG, which has a larger retail business. Its overseas weighting is slightly smaller than that of MUFG. Unlike its two Japanese megabank peers that own foreign banks outright or hold non controlling stakes in local banks overseas, Mizuho expanded in recent years beyond its traditional Japanese borrowers, mainly through its core banking and securities units, focusing on the financing needs of global multinational corporations.
(Source: Morningstar)
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