Japan’s economic revival, the cash tax and the contactless payments boom

Anybody who has lived in Japan any length of time knows the economic reality here is rarely reported accurately in the western media. The worn out narratives of the ‘lost decade’ (or is it two?), the ‘aging society’, the ‘Japan is so over’ are just too easy for the challenged journalists of our era not to use. Otherwise they might have to actually do research and fact checking.

When some American friends visited Japan in 2010 I took them on a hot spring tour. For the entire trip they marveled at how prosperous things seemed, “the media always says that Japan is in such bad shape. I can’t believe the difference.” I imagine that lots of inbound visitors are surprised by the reality they find in Japan, especially visitors from the West where the worn out narratives are endlessly recycled.

Japan’s economic revival began with the Nikkei stock market revival when the Abe Government took power on December 26, 2014. A nice little Christmas present that keeps on giving. And now Morgan Stanley is taking notice, it even mentions the role of contactless payments in Japan’s continuing economic growth:

Another contributor to growth will come from Japan’s shift away from cash. Just 21% of transactions in Japan are currently cashless, versus an average of 45% outside Japan. “Reducing the cost of cash processing is a key element of productivity reforms,” says Japan Banks analyst Mia Nagasaka, who forecasts that cashless transactions will expand to 30% of the total by 2025.

Although a reduction in cash transactions is good news for the economy as a whole, it is particularly important for banks. As in the U.S. and other markets, Japanese banks stand to save a great deal as consumers switch to mobile banking and paying with credit cards or digital wallets rather than cash. All told, Nagasaka believes that Japan’s megabanks could raise their average return on equity from 6% currently to 8% by 2025 through cost-cutting and technology adoption. Under this scenario, valuations for Japanese banks would improve from 0.6 times book value to nearly 1x—a big leap in an industry that many investors had written off.

With just one year to go until the Japanese sales tax is raised to 10% there are some very interesting implementation proposals the Abe Government is putting on the table. The most interesting one is the ‘cash tax’: when you pay for things in cash you pay a 10% sales tax, when you pay for things with contactless payment you pay 8% sales tax, exactly what everybody pays now.

If the proposals are passed by the Japanese National Diet, it will certainly drive the growing contactless payments wave to tsunami size. Everybody who does not use contactless payments now will certainly start doing so to save 2% at at checkout. The changes will be fascinating to watch. Apple’s global FeliCa move is looking more genius all the time.