Dai-ichi Raises $11 Billion in World’s Biggest IPO of 2010

March 24 (Bloomberg) -- Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Co. will raise 1.01 trillion yen ($11 billion) in the world’s biggest initial public offering in two years after pricing the IPO at the middle of its forecast range.

Japan’s second-largest life insurer priced 7.2 million shares in the demutualization at 140,000 yen each, according to a statement posted on the company’s Web site yesterday.

The offering is the largest since San Francisco-based Visa Inc. sold $19.7 billion in March 2008 and comes after money raised from IPOs in Japan fell to the lowest level in at least two decades last year. The price may ensure that Dai-ichi gains when it’s listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange April 1, according to Ichiyoshi Investment Management Co.’s Mitsushige Akino.

“Most Japanese investors probably expected it to be 155,000 yen so it’s quite cheap,” said Akino, who oversees $450 million as chief investment officer of Ichiyoshi in Tokyo. “It’s the best scenario, where the price will rise bit by bit, rather than a short-lived popularity.”

The IPO by Dai-ichi, which will change its name to Dai-ichi Life Insurance Co., is also the biggest in Japan since Tokyo- based NTT DoCoMo Inc. went public in 1998, Bloomberg data show.

Dai-ichi’s market capitalization will be equal to 0.56 times embedded value, or the sum of its net assets and the current value of future profits from existing policies. That’s more expensive than T&D Holdings Inc., Japan’s largest publicly listed life insurer, and cheaper than Sony Financial Holdings Inc., the insurance and banking unit of Tokyo-based Sony Corp., data compiled by Bloomberg show.

‘Reasonable’

“The pricing seems reasonable,” said Yoshihiro Ito, a senior strategist at Tokyo-based Okasan Asset Management Co., which oversees about $8 billion. “The question is how well it will do the on the first day of trading, given the prospect for life insurers in Japan.”

Dai-ichi is switching from mutual to stock-based ownership to expand fundraising options for acquisitions and partnerships as it grapples with an aging society and the slowest-growing economy in Asia.

Nomura Holdings Inc. and Mizuho Financial Group Inc. in Tokyo and Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch unit were hired to manage the offering. New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was a global arranger.

Overallotment

Dai-ichi will have 10 million shares outstanding, 5 million of which were sold in Japan and 2.1 million overseas, according to the statement. The Tokyo-based company will issue 100,000 shares in an overallotment and another 2.9 million will be distributed to policyholders.

T&D Holdings of Tokyo has a market capitalization of 684.9 billion yen, or 0.47 times its embedded value, based on a sale document distributed by banks involved with the Dai-ichi offering. Tokyo-based Sony Financial has a ratio of 0.84.

Prudential Plc of London, the U.K.’s biggest insurer, paid 1.69 times the embedded value of New York-based American International Group Inc.’s Asian life insurance unit in its takeover announced this month.

Japanese companies had raised $490 million yen in six IPOs so far this year, compared with 15 U.S. deals totalling almost $3 billion, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The Dai-ichi deal will make this year the biggest for Japanese IPOs since 2006, when companies raised 2.14 trillion yen, Bloomberg data show. Sales sank to 56 billion yen last year as the collapse of New York-based Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. froze credit markets and the Topix index posted the worst performance in the world’s 20 biggest equity markets.

Acquisitions

Dai-ichi, which had 8.2 million policyholders as of March 2009, will use proceeds of the sale to convert to stock-based ownership from policy-based mutual ownership. The switch will expand fundraising options for acquisitions and partnerships as the population declines, the company told policyholders in June.

Japan’s life insurers are struggling for new customers after the first global recession since World War II. The nation’s economy will grow less than 2 percent annually through at least 2012 after contracting 1.2 percent in 2008 and 5.2 percent last year, estimates compiled by Bloomberg show.

That compares with growth of 9.6 percent projected for China this year, while gross domestic product in the U.S. will rise at least 3 percent annually from 2010 to 2012, the estimates show.

Almost 23 percent of Japan’s 126 million people will be older than 65 this year, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., data compiled by Bloomberg show. Japan is the world’s oldest society, with a median age of 44, according to the United Nations’ World Population Ageing 2009 report.