Global banking giant HSBC said yesterday it had laid off 100 private bankers in Hong Kong, as demand for their services has shrunk amid the economic downturn.
“Changing market conditions have affected business volumes and have led private banking to review its business to ensure it remains competitive and well-placed to serve its clients,” a spokesman for the bank told reporters.
The spokesman said the layoffs represented 8 percent of their 1,200 private banking staff in Hong Kong.
The cuts were the latest in a wave of layoffs in the finance sector.
Last week, embattled Swiss banking giant UBS AG said it would cut 240 jobs, about 8 percent of the workforce, at its wealth management group in the Asia-Pacific, according to Dow Jones Newswires. In February, Deutsche Bank AG cut about 70 of its wealth management staff in Hong Kong and Singapore, sources told Dow Jones.
Meanwhile, Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley is considering buying a regional bank in the US to expand its retail banking business, a report said yesterday.
“Now that we’re a bank holding company, deposits are important to us,” Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack was quoted as telling Japan’s Nikkei Business Daily in an interview, according to its English language Web site. “We are looking for potential opportunities to buy a bank that has a presence in an important market in the United States.”
Morgan Stanley announced in January a deal to merge its global wealth management business with that of troubled rival Citigroup.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
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