Targeting emerging affluent clients in Asia, Standard Chartered Bank (渣打銀行) plans to recruit 850 customer relation managers in the next 18 months, 430 of whom will be deployed in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, to provide upgraded premium banking services, a bank executive said yesterday.
“We hope to double our [high net worth] client base [in the eight major Asian markets] over the next three years,” Singapore-based Foo Mee Har (胡美霞), global head of the company’s premium banking, told a media briefing in Taipei.
The bank expects its sales of premium services to grow more than double the industry’s growth rate, said Foo, who refused to reveal the bank’s current number of affluent clients or the total assets under the bank’s management.
Standard Chartered defines affluent clients as those who have more than US$100,000 in disposable assets.
Foo said the region’s wealth accumulation had a greater potential than countries in Europe or the US.
In Taiwan, the affluent population could grow from 1.7 million last year to 2 million in 2012, while that in China is expected to grow from 8.8 million to 13.7 million and India from 1.3 million to 1.8 million, she said, citing estimates by Boston Consulting Group.
Moreover, the number of Taiwanese who have more than US$1 million in assets has already reached 250,000 people, more than in Switzerland, Foo said.
Asia (excluding Japan) topped other emerging markets, with an annualized 16 percent growth in wealth between 2003 and last year, compared with Latin America’s 14 percent and North American’s 6 percent, and is expected to see another combined annualized growth of 12 percent between last year and 2012 — the world’s highest, she said.
Standard Chartered offers to waive transaction fees for its premium clients and up to three of their family members when wiring money to overseas bank accounts.
The bank also provides discounts for foreign exchange services and a three-hour wire transfer in US dollars between China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to