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.
Mercuries Life Insurance Co (三商美邦人壽) shares surged to a seven-month high this week after local media reported that E.Sun Financial Holding Co (玉山金控) had outbid CTBC Financial Holding Co (中信金控) in the financially strained insurer’s ongoing sale process. Shares of the mid-sized life insurer climbed 5.8 percent this week to NT$6.72, extending a nearly 18 percent rally over the past month, as investors bet on the likelihood of an impending takeover. The final round of bidding closed on Thursday, marking a critical step in the 32-year-old insurer’s search for a buyer after years of struggling to meet capital adequacy requirements. Local media reports
TECHNOLOGICAL RIVALRY: The artificial intelligence chip competition among multiple players would likely intensify over the next two years, a Quanta official said Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), which makes servers and laptops on a contract basis, yesterday said its shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s GB300 chips have increased steadily since last month, should surpass those of the GB200 models this quarter. The production of GB300 servers has gone much more smoothly than that of the GB200, with shipments projected to increase sharply next month, Quanta executive vice president Mike Yang (楊麒令) said on the sidelines of a technology forum in Taipei. While orders for GB200 servers gradually decrease, the production transition between the two server models has been
US sports leagues rushed to get in on the multi-billion US dollar bonanza of legalized betting, but the arrest of an National Basketball Association (NBA) coach and player in two sprawling US federal investigations show the potential cost of partnering with the gambling industry. Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, a former Detroit Pistons star and an NBA Hall of Famer, was arrested for his alleged role in rigged illegal poker games that prosecutors say were tied to Mafia crime families. Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier was charged with manipulating his play for the benefit of bettors and former NBA player and
BETTER THAN EXPECTED: The firm’s Q3 results exceeded its projections, based on ‘the underlying strength of our core markets,’ chief financial officer Dave Zinsner said Intel Corp returned to profitability and gave an upbeat revenue forecast after PC demand grew, suggesting that it is making progress on a long and challenging comeback attempt. In the third quarter, revenue rose 3 percent to US$13.7 billion. The Santa Clara, California-based company posted its first quarterly net income since the end of 2023, with earnings per share of US$0.23, excluding some items. Analysts had estimated sales of US$13.2 billion and earnings per share of US$0.01 on average, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Fourth-quarter sales would be roughly US$13.3 billion, the company said in a statement on Thursday. Intel shares gained about
RSS