By Taiga Uranaka
TOKYO, April 18 (Reuters) - Like oil-leaking BP plc a year ago, disaster-whipped Tokyo Electric Power is mulling a fire sale of assets to help pay compensation claims against its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Unlike BP, which had a valuable bag of oil and gas fields to hawk, Asia's No.1 utility has little to sell.
Still struggling to contain Japan's worst nuclear crisis, Tokyo Electric, commonly known as TEPCO, is deciding which assets it can offload to help meet compensation that could very well exceed the $20 billion of claims BP received in the past year.
About 60 percent of the 13 trillion yen ($156 billion) worth of assets on TEPCO's balance sheet are nuclear plants and other fixed assets used in power production.
"BP has oil-producing revenue assets, but TEPCO is in quite a different position," said Ben Wedmore, director of equity research at MF Global FXA Securities. "TEPCO is generation assets, distribution assets, power lines and so on, but these are things they cannot sell."
The most valuable gem in its portfolio is a 7.9 percent stake in KDDI , a telecommunications company that owns Japan's No. 2 mobile phone network.
That will be the first asset under the hammer, according to a local media report, but even if TEPCO manages to sell all the shares in one go, it will raise only 180 billion yen ($2.2 billion) at its current price.
It's top 10 stock holdings in companies not directly involved in its generating business amount to no more than 210 billion yen combined, while TEPCO values the stocks on its books at 310 billion yen.
COSTS UNCLEAR
BP, which on Wednesday marks the first anniversary of the explosion aboard its Deepwater Horizon rig near the Louisiana coast that sparked the world's worst oil spill, is planning to sell $30 billion in assets.
That includes the sale in October to Apache Corp of oil reserves in Canada for $7 billion.
Costs resulting from TEPCO's leaking reactors will likely exceed BP's costs.
JP Morgan has estimated TEPCO could face 2 trillion yen ($24 billion) in compensation losses in the financial year that started this month. Bank of America-Merrill Lynch has said the bill could reach $130 billion if the crisis continues.
How much TEPCO will pay and how much the tax payer and other utilities may shoulder is still unclear. Outlays are already mounting, however, following an agreement to 50 billion yen in initial handouts to people forced to evacuate from a 30 kilometer wide strip around its stricken nuclear plant.
TEPCO, which employs 53,000 workers, is also unlikely to make much headway paring costs as any savings from staff cuts will be eaten up by other expenses, say analysts, including the cost of adding conventional fossil fuel-fired generating capacity to avert a power crunch during peak demand in the summer.
"TEPCO is expected to make drastic cost cuts like reductions in labour costs, but the impact of such efforts on its overall profits is likely to be limited," said Hiroki Shibata, an analyst at Standard & Poor's Ratings in Tokyo.
"For capital expenditure, I think it would be hard to make large savings since the company is likely to make additional investments to secure a stable power supply and to improve safety," Shibata said.
TEPCO's best asset, say analysts, may be its too-big-to-fail status as the sole provider of electricity to Japan's capital and surrounding prefectures, a region with an economy about the size of Britain's.
That means the state will ultimately intervene before TEPCO runs out of money, a luxury that BP does not enjoy. ($1 = 83.130 Japanese Yen) (Writing by Tim Kelly; Editing by Nathan Layne and Edmund Klamann)