TOKYO, Nov 4: The collapse of Japan's Sanyo Securities is a victory for market forces, but the first listed brokerage to go bust since World War II may not be the last, analysts said on Tuesday.

``This has got to be seen as a positive development,'' said Paul Heaton, banking analyst at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. ``One of the concerns about the securities industry has been that healthy companies will be required to bail out their weaker competitors,'' he said. ``This is an effective statement that that will not be the case.''

Sanyo Securities, one of Japan's top 10 brokers, went bankrupt on Monday with liabilities of 373.6 billion yen (US$ 3.1 billion) at the present level. The securities firm went under after nine life assurance firms refused to extend deadlines on 20 billion yen worth of loans provided as part of a restructuring package in 1994.

It was the first bankruptcy of a Japanese securities house listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the 11th largest in Japan since the end of World War II.

Yoshinobu Yamada, analyst at Merrill Lynch, said the Sanyo failure was a signal that other healthy companies in the sector would not be prepared to extend ``unreasonable support.'' He warned of the possibility that smaller securities companies would face tough times ahead as they relied heavily on equities commissions, which would be pressured by greater competition in the finance sector.

``Tokyo Big Bang'' deregulatory reforms promoted by Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto are aimed at turning the Tokyo financial market into a ``fair and transparent'' operation matching New York and London by 2001.

The Asahi Evening News said in a Front-page analysis that the Sanyo Securities failure underlined the decline of the finance ministry's protective ``convoy system'' through which robust firms helped out their weaker brethren.

Major life insurers, banks and brokerages refused the ministry's repeated requests to extend help to Sanyo Securities, it said, heralding a new climate ahead of the ``Big Bang.''

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.