Germany’s Deutsche Bank AG on Wednesday said that it will not pay dividends this year and next year as it seeks to cut costs as part of a major business and management restructuring.
The Frankfurt-based lender said it hoped to resume paying dividends in 2017. It has paid a dividend every year since Germany’s postwar reconstruction, including throughout the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis.
The decision was made to help the bank meet new financial targets set for 2020, it said, which could only be achieved by withholding compensation for shareholders this year and next.
Deutsche Bank has been undergoing a massive shake-up after its former chief executives Anshu Jain and Juergen Fitschen resigned in June over a tangle of scandals and missed profit targets and were replaced by John Cryan.
Cryan is aiming to create a greater capital ratio — an indicator of strength and ability to withstand shocks — targeting a common equity Tier 1 capital ratio of 12.5 percent by 2018, compared with 11.4 percent at the end of June.
The bank is also seeking to cut expenses.
Deutsche Bank reported a 6.2 billion euro (US$7 billion) net loss in the third quarter, the largest three-month loss in at least a decade, as stricter capital requirements reduce the value of its investment bank and the firm reserved funds for legal costs.
Revenue from trading debt and currencies, the investment bank unit’s biggest component, rose to 20 percent to 1.73 billion euros last quarter, while equity trading revenue fell 19 percent to 588 million euros, the company said in a statement yesterday.
The bank is currently embroiled in about 6,000 different legal cases and was fined in May a record US$2.5 billion for its involvement in rigging interest rates.
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