Singapore’s OCBC to buy Wing Hang Bank for HK$38.4b
Singapore lender taps into growing Southeast Asia-Greater China money flows with acquisition of city's second largest family-controlled bank
Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp, Southeast Asia's second-largest lender, has offered HK$38.4 billion to fully acquire Wing Hang Bank, the eighth-largest lender in Hong Kong, to tap into increasing money flows between Southeast Asia and China.
OCBC chief executive Samuel Tsien, the former chief executive of China Construction Bank's Hong Kong subsidiary China Construction Bank (Asia), said the acquisition would immediately lift China's contribution to group earnings to 16 per cent, from 6 per cent, with that contribution to rise as Wing Hang was integrated with the Singaporean bank.
"The flow [between North and Southeast Asia] we currently see - a US$600 billion trade flow and a US$11 billion investment flow in 2013 alone - is a big market which only regional banks will be able to tap into," Tsien said yesterday. "You need to have a presence in both areas before you can tap into that."
The purchase of Wing Hang, the second-largest family-controlled lender in the city after Bank of East Asia, gives OCBC an additional 70 branches in China - 42 in Hong Kong, 15 on the mainland and 13 in Macau - on top of its more than 450 branches, mainly in Southeast Asia, with 16 in mainland China and one in Hong Kong.
Tsien said OCBC intended to add more branches on the mainland. He also said there would be no redundancies at Wing Hang in the next 18 months.
