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HSBC Puts Indian Bank Holdings On The Block
HSBC has offered its entire stakes in India's Axis Bank and Yes Bank through share sales worth up to 24.5 billion rupees ($429 million).
HSBC has offered its entire stakes in India's Axis Bank and Yes Bank through share sales worth up to 24.5 billion rupees ($429 million), coming as the latest sign of retreat from parts of Asia.
"HSBC Iris Investments (Mauritius), an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of HSBC Holdings, has sold its stakes in two non-core investments in India. The sales of 4.73 per cent in Axis Bank Limited and 4.74 per cent in Yes Bank Limited were undertaken on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India respectively," HSBC said in a statement.
The total cash proceeds from the sales were INR24.3bn (around US$425 million), comprising INR18.8 billion for the 4.73 per cent stake in Axis Bank and INR5.5 billion for the 4.74 per cent stake in Yes Bank.
It comes as yet another Asian business for the UK-headquartered bank to exit. Last year HSBC outlined plans to cull 3,000 jobs in Hong Kong as part of a cost-cutting strategy, and exited retail and private banking divisions in South Korea, Japan and Thailand. But at an investor meeting in May this year, chief executive Stuart Gulliver insisted that the bank's commitment to wealth management in Asia was stronger than ever.
“Wealth management is core to Hong Kong, it's core to the UK, and it’s core to 18 other markets," said Gulliver at the conference.
"There are 18 countries where we have a (wealth management) presence. What we’ve done by exiting places like Korea and Japan is to get out of mass retail banking in countries where we don’t have the size and scale to compete against the domestic banks who are also doing mass retail banking. If you take Japan for example, we can’t compete with the indigenous Japanese lenders."
"But wealth is a tremendous opportunity for us in many parts of Asia, like Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. We are in the part of the world which will see disproportionate GDP growth, and so huge wealth creation over the next few years.”
