The LSE Directory / Index providers
Nikkei Inc.'s Index Business Office administers the Nikkei 225, the price-weighted benchmark of 225 companies listed on the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The index's base date was retroactively set to May 16, 1949, and Nikkei Inc. has calculated and published it since 1970, when the Tokyo Stock Exchange handed the job over and switched to publishing TOPIX instead. Since 2017 the index has been recalculated every five seconds during trading hours, with a divisor mechanism that adjusts for stock splits, constituent changes and other corporate actions so the index reflects only genuine price movement. Unlike the market-capitalization-weighted benchmarks most competitors run, such as TOPIX or MSCI's country indexes, the Nikkei 225 is price-weighted, closer in construction to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, so higher-priced constituents move the index more than larger-cap but lower-priced ones. The Index Business Office is run as a division structurally independent from Nikkei's newspaper and media operations, specifically to remove conflicts of interest in index administration, and its compliance with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks has been audited by an independent third party in reports published since 2019; it is also recognised as a third-country benchmark administrator under Article 32 of the EU Benchmarks Regulation. Beyond the flagship index, the office publishes the broader Nikkei 500, various sector indexes, and the JPX-Nikkei Index 400, developed jointly with Japan Exchange Group and Tokyo Stock Exchange and launched January 6, 2014, plus ESG and strategy variants, so licensees can draw on a family of related benchmarks rather than a single number. The Nikkei 225 underlies futures contracts on the Singapore Exchange (since 1986), the Osaka Exchange (since 1988) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (since 1990), and is tracked directly by exchange-traded funds including BlackRock's iShares Nikkei 225 products. Nikkei Inc, the parent company, traces its roots to the 1876 launch of the Chugai Bukka Shimpo market-quotation bulletin, took its present name, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, in 1946, and remains employee-owned, since Japanese law bars newspaper publishers from being publicly traded. In 2015 Nikkei Inc acquired the Financial Times Group from Pearson for 844 million pounds, about 1.3 billion dollars at the time, one of the largest acquisitions by a Japanese media company. On February 22, 2024, the Nikkei 225 closed above its December 29, 1989 bubble-era peak of 38,915.87 for the first time in over 34 years, then broke 40,000 for the first time on March 4, 2024, a milestone widely read as marking the end of Japan's post-bubble stock market malaise.
