TOKYO: Anyone can see why Nippon Steel’s US$15 billion attempt to acquire US Steel appears doomed to fail. It’s not the price. It’s not the terms. It’s not the shareholders. It’s the election, stupid.

Perhaps. 

By the time American voters go to the polls in November, it will be almost 11 months since the Japanese steelmaker (very naively, to some) launched its bid for the US company. It placed a meaty premium on its target but underestimated the even meatier discount of being foreign in an election year.

The steelmaker’s motives are much the same as those of many other Japanese companies now perpetuating an M&A boom that remains overwhelmingly focused on the US. Corporate Japan’s future depends, to an ever greater extent, on its ability to grow and invest outside its home country, and America is where Japan most wants to grow and invest. 

Japanese housebuilders, tech giants and banks have all recently done deals that attest to the still unsatiated appetite for American assets. None of their targets has headquarters in Pittsburghowking, in the electorally knife-edge state of Pennsylvania, but that has not, according to M&A bankers, allayed growing concerns about whether “normal” is likely to come back to dealmaking in the US.

File photo. The US Steel acquisition plan, announced by Nippon Steel in December, has become a controversial issue ahead of the US presidential election in November. (Photo: Getty Images North America/AFP/Jeff Swensen)

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