Standard Chartered, the emerging markets bank, said yesterday that its net profits jumped a fifth to US$3.41 billion last year, leaving it well-placed to tackle the Asia slowdown.
Despite the lift in profits after tax, Standard Chartered was not immune to rising bad debts linked to the credit crisis, as it wrote off US$1.79 billion last year, more than double the amount of US$818 million in 2007.
“To deliver record results in this exceptional environment is a great achievement,” the bank’s acting chairman John Peace said in the group’s earnings statement.
Chief executive Peter Sands said the best way to continue delivering shareholder value was through Standard Chartered’s “rigorous focus on Asia, Africa and the Middle East” in addition to a “prudent approach to liquidity and capital” and “continued discipline in cost and risk management.”
He said Asian banks were better placed to weather the financial crisis than their Western peers, which are losing billions of dollars because of the credit crisis and issuing new shares to boost capital.
“While Asian banks are feeling the stress, as dollar liquidity dries up and the credit environment deteriorates, they are on the whole in much better shape than many counterparts in the West,” Sands said in the statement.
“The ingredients of the banking crisis in the UK and the US, the over-leverage, overcomplexity and opacity, are not present to nearly the same extent,” he said.
A company is described as highly “leveraged” if it finances its activities by relying heavily on borrowed money.
Sands said it was “also unwise to draw too many analogies” to the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s.
“In fact, the resilience of Asia owes much to lessons learnt from that experience. This time most countries have substantial foreign currency reserves and strong fiscal positions. This time most businesses have relatively conservative balance sheets,” he said.
As for Standard Chartered, Sands said the second-biggest British banking group after HSBC “was focused on building balance sheet strength and on maintaining high levels of liquidity,” adding that it was “on a firm footing for the challenges and opportunities that will come during 2009.”
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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