Milton Financials: Tokyo Commodities Exchange will consider merger offers says president.

Tocom’s president says the exchange will consider mergers with other exchanges as Japan aims to consolidate bourses.

Milton Financials has learned that the president of Japan’s biggest raw-material bourse has announced that the Tokyo Commodity Exchange Inc. (Tocom) would be open to merger talks with other exchanges as the Japanese government considers creating a one-stop exchange for financial products.

Tocom, which once ranked as the second-largest commodities exchange after the New York Mercantile Exchange, only managed 11th position last year and was overtaken by China’s Shanghai and Dalian exchanges.

The Japanese government recently began discussions on whether to combine securities, currencies and commodity exchanges into one exchange by 2013 in order to increase trade and remain competitive, the bourses President Tadashi Ezaki told Milton Financials sources in a recent interview in Tokyo.

“We welcome the government’s move,” the president told reporters. “I think nobody will oppose the integration if we become confident through the discussion that it will contribute to revitalizing trade.”

The value of China’s stock market shot above Japan’s in October to become the second-largest behind the U.S., and presently has capitalization of around $3.96 trillion compared to Japan’s $3.65 trillion.
Hong Kong overtook Japan for the first time as Asia’s most-profitable market for stock lenders, driven by investor demand for Chinese securities in short sales.

In late October the vice-ministers for financial services, trade and agriculture in Japan put together a task team to work on exchange integration details proposed by Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s cabinet. They aim to have an interim report ready by the end of the year after conducting hearings with concerned parties.

“As shrinking trade in commodities futures is undermining earnings of domestic exchanges, and as there are no signs of recovery in the near future, they may have no other options but to merge with larger financial bourses,” a research manager at Mitsubishi Corp. Futures Ltd. told Milton Financials recently.

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This release was published on openPR.