YouSaid · the spoken record

Howard Smith

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-08-18
most recent: 2022-08-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think it was absolutely formative. So I experienced the end of the bubble, the peak of the bubble, and then the beginning of the bursting of the bubble. The market peaked in December 1989, and the Bank of Japan was raising rates through 1990. So being at Nomora at the time, I had a front row seat on the bubble peaking and then the bubble bursting. And of course, that was the beginning of a great balance sheet recession in Japan. The ramifications of which persist to this day, we're still talking about this 30 years later.”
2022-08-18 · Capital Allocators · Howard Smith – Japanese Equities at Indus Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.35) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 2018, so that was a 21 year period. And if you add on the four-year period between 1988 and 1992, I lived in Tokyo for 25 years in total, which is the majority of my adult life. And most of that time has been spent with Indus. I joined Indus in 2002 from ING bearings. And I spent the last 20 years. This year is my 20th anniversary at Indus.”
2022-08-18 · Capital Allocators · Howard Smith – Japanese Equities at Indus Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.35) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a great storyteller. And he's written work was exceptionally interesting to read. So this to me was a tremendously fascinating nexus of being able to apply some technical knowledge about accounting and modeling and forecasting with writing and projecting a message. And I found this really, really interesting. But through my job as a junior retail analyst, I got to know Byron Gill, who was in Tokyo at the time as a retail analyst. And Byron is now the managing partner of Indus Capital and one of the founding partners of the firm in the year 2000. So that's how my path crossed with Byron that dates back to the late 1990s when we were bumping into each other at convenience store, merchandise fairs and comparing dried shrimp crackers and yogurt drinks and stuff like that. I was in Japan between'97.”
2022-08-18 · Capital Allocators · Howard Smith – Japanese Equities at Indus Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.35) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we ended up returning to Tokyo in 1997. And this time it was the start of my love affair with corporate finance and single stock analysis. And I got a job as a stock analyst at what was then called ING Bearing Securities. Bearings had famously gone bust in 1995 after Nick Leeson brought the bank down, punting in Nike Futures. So ING, which is a Dutch insurance company, had taken over Bering's Bank and was called ING Bearings. And I got to work with a really inspirational guy called Mike Allen, who was the retail analyst at Bearings at the time. And I took on some of the smaller cap retail stocks working under him. And that really lit up in me a passion for corporate finance and for analyzing P&L and balance sheet and cash flow. And Mike was and still is to this day an extremely passionate writer.”
2022-08-18 · Capital Allocators · Howard Smith – Japanese Equities at Indus Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.35) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been married now for almost 30 years. And we moved back to the UK in the mid-90s. And I got a job in London with the Economist Intelligence Unit, which is the publishing arm of the Economist newspaper writing quarterly reports on macroeconomics. And I covered a number of countries, including Japan, but I also wrote about South Korea and North Korea and Taiwan. And that was a wonderful job for me. But I always had a desire to go back to Japan again and develop something more of myself in Japan. I'd had a relatively junior role in Tokyo between 1988 and 1992. And having got proficient in the language, I always felt that I could do more.”
2022-08-18 · Capital Allocators · Howard Smith – Japanese Equities at Indus Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.35) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the country, and it's absolutely made me more proficient at the job I do now. But I ended up working at Nomora in Japan. My background was economics and finance at university. That was the area I'd always wanted to go in. And I was working with a guy called Richard Kuh at Nomora, who's still there. And he was a macro guy, and he was sort of a bridge between Japan and the US on areas like monetary policy. He was very well connected at the Federal Reserve and also at the Bank of Japan. So I did some ghost writing for him. I did some editing work for him. And my goal then was to be a macro guy. I wanted to develop a career as a strategist or a macroeconomist. I hadn't yet developed an interest in single stock analysis or corporate finance. I was set on having some career to do with Japan in a macro field. And I ended up getting married in Japan. I met my wife in Tokyo.”
2022-08-18 · Capital Allocators · Howard Smith – Japanese Equities at Indus Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.35) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the peak of the asset bubble. I was completely out of my depth. I didn't speak a word of the language. And in those days, Tokyo wasn't a particularly international city. There were very few signs in English. I didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't go from A to B on the train system very effectively. It was a struggle to find somewhere to live. I soon realized that if I was going to make something of myself in this country, I absolutely had to get proficient in the language. You couldn't go into a restaurant and say, do you speak English? That didn't work. I used to work in France and Spain, but it didn't work in Tokyo in those days. So I spent about a year and a half, actually, at a language school studying four hours a day. And that was very, very enriching for me because it opened up so many avenues. And suddenly I could communicate with people and ask questions of people. And that was probably the best decision I made because I think it's completely changed my relationship.”
2022-08-18 · Capital Allocators · Howard Smith – Japanese Equities at Indus Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.35) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was going to work in London. I had a job all fixed up in London. I was going to be a property analyst analysing rents and yields on commercial property in the UK. But my interest in Japan had been building during this period. So much to the shock and horror of my parents, I announced that I wasn't going to take up this job in London and that I was going to get on a plane to go to Tokyo. I didn't have a job to go to in Tokyo. So I imagined this would be kind of a one-year endeavor to learn a little bit of language and maybe make a little bit of money and then hopefully come back to this job. And I told them that this is what I was going to do and they very kindly held the offer open for me and said it was an open offer and I could take it up again. So I got on an aeroflot aircraft in October 1988. I turned up in Tokyo for the first time. That's where my real relationship with Japan started. It was a wild and crazy place in 1980.”
2022-08-18 · Capital Allocators · Howard Smith – Japanese Equities at Indus Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.35) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of a single mom for about three years, and we didn't see my father much. So that I think also inspired in me a desire one day to work overseas and to stretch my wings a bit and look outside in the big wide world, outside the little village where I grew up. I guess I had that sort of wonder lust from an early age and I would credit my parents with their summer trips and my dad's job in the Middle East for kind of really triggering that interest.”
2022-08-18 · Capital Allocators · Howard Smith – Japanese Equities at Indus Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.35) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source