HSBC Holdings PLC spent 150 years building a financial fortress around Hong Kong that touches nearly every aspect of life in the territory.
One of the bank’s biggest threats? A pack of upstart virtual lenders, which barely existed two months ago, backed by the likes of Standard Chartered PLC and Chinese Internet insurer ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance Co (眾安在線財產保險).
Few if any of the world’s largest financial companies dominate a single market quite like HSBC does in Hong Kong, a territory of 7.5 million people that accounted for about 60 percent of the bank’s pretax income last year.
That makes HSBC a juicy target for the handful of “virtual” lenders vying to shake up the territory’s banking market after securing first-of-their kind approvals in March.
HSBC already offers digital services as well as maintains branches in Hong Kong, so clients can use whichever channel they want, a bank spokeswoman said by e-mail.
These include trade transactions through blockchain technology, while HSBC’s PayMe mobile wallet has more than 1.5 million users, she said.
The bank’s adjusted revenue from Hong Kong rose 14 percent last year and it hired additional staff in the Hong Kong-China region, the spokeswoman said.
HSBC, which owns about 60 percent of subsidiary Hang Seng Bank Ltd (恒生銀行), has the biggest share across all major banking businesses in Hong Kong, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
It has also been the territory’s biggest mortgage lender in the secondary market for the past two years, Centaline Mortgage Broker Ltd data showed.
One of the three note-issuing banks in Hong Kong, HSBC dominates revenue share in the territory.
As well as mortgages, commercial banking powers the top line.
Pretax profit at the London-based lender as a share of Hong Kong’s GDP dwarfs the same ratio at the rest of the world’s biggest banks, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.
While Hong Kong is far smaller than China or the US, it is also a regional financial hub, servicing not only China, but much of the Asia-Pacific region.
HSBC’s revenue from Hong Kong accounted for one-third of its global total last year.
While small compared with many of the world’s major markets, Hong Kong’s attractiveness in banking is buoyed by its status as the world’s most expensive place to buy property — a position that has contributed to the biggest wealth gap among developed economies.
About 30 percent of the territory’s total banking revenue is up for grabs for the new virtual lenders, Goldman Sachs analysts said in September last year.
That translates to about US$15 billion, of which US$3 billion could come from HSBC and US$1.7 billion from Hang Seng Bank, they said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six