Japan’s Warren Buffet dies at 83
Japan, the world’s biggest buyer of LNG,
1.46 billion tonnes of supply between next year and 2040. pic
Japanese LNG buyers from traditional importers into international sellers. The country is forecast to have a surplus of 12.2 billion cubic metres of LNG next year, 8.1 billion in 2018 and 8.6 billion in 2019, according to a February report from BMI Research.
“If destination clauses are found to be illegal, it will give Japanese buyers more bargaining power to renegotiate existing contracts for flexibility,” said Lu Wang, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Other Asian LNG consumer countries may try to follow Japan, analysts, including David Hewitt at Credit Suisse Group AG, said in a report yesterday.
“We would be surprised to see sellers permanently remove the restriction without the threat of a legal requirement,” according to the report. “But some sellers may choose to temporarily ease the restriction (say a three-year easement) to help with the near-term oversupply pressure.”
Barriers to re-shipping LNG will still exist even if destination restrictions are ended. Many sellers, such
as Qatar, have their own LNG tanker fleets and have contracts structured so that the buyers only take possession of the fuel once its been delivered. That means the buyer would have to pay for the added cost of reloading and reshipping fuel it wants to resell.
To estimate the volume of Japanese supply bought via longterm deals with destination clauses, Bloomberg News stripped out 435.5 million tonnes from the country’s contracts listed in BNEF’s global LNG database that either don’t include a destination clause or originate from the United States, which traditionally has no export restrictions. The remainder — from countries including Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Qatar and Russia — account for about 70 per cent of Japan’s total 1.463 billion tonnes of supply.
Asian spot prices for LNG have slumped more than 60 per cent since September 2014 amid new supplies from Australia and the US. Japan paid about 64,838 yen per LNG tonne last year, according to the Ministry of Finance. Bloomberg TOKYO: Wahei Takeda, a cookie tycoon who was known as Japan’s Warren Buffett for his six decades of stock picking, has died. He was 83.
He died yesterday at his home in Nagoya, according to Eri Sanada, a spokeswoman for Takeda Honsha KK, one of his firms. Local newspaper Chunichi Shimbun reported the news earlier.
One of Japan’s best-known individual investors, Takeda had been buying equities since 1956 after a stockbroker friend encouraged him to take the money he had made selling pineapple-cream cookies and put it in shares.
Takeda also founded a company manufacturing Tamago Boro, small round egg biscuits that are typically given to babies in Japan.
Takeda had top 10 stakes at more than 100 companies valued at 30 billion yen (RM1.15 billion), making him Japan’s No. 1 individual investor, the Nikkei newspaper reported in 2006.
In an interview with Bloomberg News in 2014, Takeda said he was paring back his equity investments to focus on companies with high return-on-equity, a measure of profit relative to shareholder capital. He held shares in more than 100 companies in 2011 and was seeking to reduce holdings to just six or seven companies, the investor said at the time.
“There are no stock investors in Japan who wouldn’t know Takeda — he’s one of the most famous individual investors and he’s been in the market a long time,” said Seiichiro Iwamoto at Mizuho Asset Management Co in 2014. Bloomberg