Japanese Insurer No Longer on NASDAQ

To save costs, Japanese carrier Millea Holdings, a holding company with life and non-life insurance operations, voluntarily took itself off the US NASDAQ market and discontinued reporting its earnings as stipulated by US accounting rules. This move follows several other foreign companies who chose to delist recently because of the high cost of maintaining a listing and complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a set of tough accounting laws enacted to combat fraud after the Enron scandal.

Published on July 5, 2007

Millea, also announced plans to buy back up to 7 million of its own shares, or 31 billion yen ($253 million) worth, approximately 0.8 percent of its outstanding shares.

According to Millea it no longer made sense to pay to keep its listing and report under U. accounting standards given that trading of its shares on Nasdaq accounted for only 2 percent of its total trading volume over the past 12 months.

The company, owned about one-third by foreign investors, said its American Depositary Shares (ADS) would be delisted from Nasdaq on July 26. It will arrange for trading to take place on the U.S. over-the-counter market from the same day.

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