HSBC’s global head of insurance, David Fried, is to step down next month, people familiar with the matter said.
Fried will be replaced by Marcelo Teixeira, currently head of insurance in Latin America, one of the people said.
Fried has been chief executive officer of insurance since April last year and will retire on Oct. 1, the sources said. He has been with the bank for more than two decades and was previously head of HSBC Insurance for Asia Pacific.
HSBC declined to comment.
HSBC says it is one of the world’s most profitable insurers, with the unit making a pretax profit of US$3.3 billion last year, up from US$2.5 billion in 2009. It has 6,500 staff and about 20 million policyholders.
Net earned insurance premiums rose to US$6.7 billion in the first half of this year from US$5.7 billion a year earlier, driven by growing demand for life insurance products.
HSBC chief executive Stuart Gulliver is restructuring the bank to strip away non-core units, and he has launched the sale of its non-life insurance business, which could fetch about US$1 billion, sources said on Monday.
Separately, Nomura Holdings Inc, Japan’s largest brokerage, plans to cut about 5 percent of jobs in Europe, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
The reductions may be announced as early as today, the people said, declining to be identified because the information is confidential. Fewer than 400 positions will be eliminated globally, with the majority in Europe, one of the people said.
The Tokyo-based company, which bought Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc’s Asian and European units in 2008, said on July 29 that it planned to reduce expenses at its wholesale unit by about US$400 million annually.
Nomura had 4,436 employees in Europe as of June 30, most of whom are employed in its wholesale unit, which includes its investment banking and trading operations in London.
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],”
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
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