Standard Chartered Plc, the UK bank that makes most of its money in Asia, agreed to buy the banking unit of American Express Co for about US$860 million.
Standard Chartered will pay cash equal to the net asset value of American Express Bank Ltd at completion plus US$300 million, the London-based bank said in a statement yesterday.
New York-based American Express is the third-largest credit-card network.
The acquisition will double Standard Chartered's US dollar-clearing business, add about US$22.5 billion of assets under management to the private-banking unit, and includes ``valuable'' branch licenses in India and Taiwan, the UK bank said.
"It looks like a good deal," said Mike Trippitt, a London-based analyst at Oriel Securities Ltd. "They should be able to grow the business quite nicely and it will help lift the private banking side."
Standard Chartered said that it expects to generate a "double-digit" return on investment on the acquisition in 2009, excluding integration costs. Pre-tax cost savings from combining information technology and administration will amount to "well in excess" of US$100 million a year from 2009.
"The acquisition will add capability and scale to two of the group's strategically important businesses," chief executive officer Peter Sands said in the statement.
The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of March.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained