As Goldman Sachs Group Inc moves to increase diversity on corporate boards, the investment bank is not extending the initiative to a particularly challenged region: Asia.
Chief executive officer David Solomon revealed last week that starting in July the bank would not handle initial public offerings (IPOs) for companies that lack either a female or “diverse” director.
However, the rule applies only to IPOs in the US and Europe. Asia’s exclusion is striking, given how common all-male boards are in the region. Other bastions of male dominance, including Latin America and the Middle East, also went unmentioned.
A Goldman spokeswoman said that the bank will consider implementing the plan in Asia and other regions over time after consulting with its clients, as diversity awareness improves in those areas.
“Nowadays there’s no excuse for companies to have non-diverse, all-male boards,” said Fern Ngai, CEO of Community Business, a Hong Kong-based group that advocates for responsible and inclusive business practices. Goldman “should include Asia. I don’t see why they don’t.”
On Thursday, Solomon issued the latest ultimatum from Davos that Wall Street’s biggest underwriter of IPOs in the US will no longer take a company public in the US and Europe if it lacks a director who is either female or “diverse.”
The mandate is the latest in a series of signals that non-diverse boards and management are unacceptable. BlackRock Inc and State Street Global Advisors are voting against directors at companies without a female director. Public companies with all-male boards based in California now face a US$100,000 fine under a new state law.
Asia lags behind not just the US and Europe, but also global leader Africa in the proportion of women on company boards, McKinsey Global Institute reported late last year.
A study by index provider MSCI Inc of companies in its global benchmarks last month showed about 33 percent of firms in Japan had no female board members, one percentage point worse than China and Hong Kong.
By comparison, that figure was 1 percent in the US, while it was 94 percent in Saudi Arabia.
Recent high-profile IPOs in Asia showed a paucity of female representation, with no women on the boards of Xiaomi Corp (小米) and Meituan Dianping (美團點評), which raised almost US$10 billion combined in 2018.
Goldman had a leading role in both those offerings.
The bank was the biggest underwriter of IPOs in the US and Europe last year.
It had a more modest market share in Asia, coming in 19th, according to Bloomberg league tables.
Goldman was an adviser on 86 IPOs last year, ranking sixth globally among underwriters.
In May last year, Hong Kong’s stock exchange issued a non-binding guidance letter to new IPO applicants, asking them to disclose their board-diversity policies and give an explanation if their directors are all of a single gender.
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
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],”