Betting the Business

Nintendo’ management has decided to keep in US$ a significant fraction of its revenues from exports. Nintendo has a large $7.4 billion pile of cash held in foreign currencies (70% of Nintendo’s total cash reserves). See this Wall Street Journal article.

With the sharp rise in the Yen since May 2010, after a crisis in the Eurozone erupted, and recently with the FED stimulating the economy with an aggressive monetary policy, Nintendo has accumulated large currency losses, when most of the other large currencies (Euro, Sterling and $) depreciated against the Yen.

Does it matter?

At first, one would say no. These are merely translation losses, and the competitive position of Nintendo (its ability to sell its products) is not affected by accounting losses. Moreover, Nintendo has expenses in foreign currency, so matching its revenues with operating costs in foreign currency makes sense.

This is not entirely correct, however.

Nintendo has over the past years aggressively shorted the yen to invested in other currencies, and taken advantage of higher yields abroad when compared with almost zero interest rates in Japan. This foreign currency strategy goes by the name of carry-trade, and has been massively employed by both Japanese companies and households since the late 1990s. It yielded very large gains until the eruption of the current financial crisis. Since then, investors and companies in Japan have used this strategy on and off depending on market conditions.

The Japanese Yen, like the Swiss Franc, is a currency of refuge to investors when markets get nervous. In recent years, the correlation between different measures of market volatility (for example, the Vix and iTraxx) and the Yen has been pretty high. When investors become more risk averse and fearful they go long the Yen, and when markets calm down and volatility declines, the Yen tends to lose its value. The point is that a lot of companies and individuals use the Yen to express their fears about deteriorating economic and financial conditions. And there’s plenty of that nowadays.

What this means is that, in addition to matching the currency in which its cash is held with the currency of its cash flows, Nintendo’s management has deliberately made a bet on currencies with the shareholders’ money. And recently, the bet has lost money, as in the past it has made money.

This begs the following question: Should Nintendo’s management use shareholders’ money to bet on currencies, or should it let investors decide by themselves on currency betting?

It is obvious that the majority of Japanese shareholders in Nintendo are upset with Nintendo’s currency losses, as they were presumably quite happy when Nintendo was making profits in the past from its portfolio of foreign currencies. But the management should not be surprised with shareholders’ reaction. Shareholders give the management discretion as to how retained earnings are invested, but voice their disapproval when management decisions go wrong. Betting on currencies is no different from any other investment decision. Except for the fact that Nintendo’s management has no business on betting on currencies. It’s hard to make a case that they have particular skills in doing that.

The other part of the problem relates to executive compensation. More precisely, how currency betting is treated in compensating management. Often times, currency losses and gains are not treated symmetrically in managerial compensation. Because of this, the management might be inclined to take currency bets, if it can persuade shareholders that currency gains are the result of its talent, and therefore should be followed by unexpected higher bonuses, while at the same time currency losses are not penalized with lower bonuses. How the compensation is designed creates the incentives to act so as to maximize the chances of getting the targeted compensation. Moreover, executive compensation is not entirely outside of the management’s control, and can be subtly manipulated by managers. In general, managers are smart operators, and are able to focus the attention of shareholders on operating profits when (financial losses such as currency losses) occur, claiming that these are unpredictable, and therefore not their fault. Shifting shareholders’ attention on different results ex-post is a very common managerial tactic.