Japanese firms are ‘afraid’ and will leave Hong Kong due to China crackdown, SBI boss Yoshitaka Kitao says
- Kitao highlighted Beijing’s national security law as a reason Hong Kong was now ‘not a good place for financial institutions’
- ‘If I want to do business in China, I would rather have an office in Beijing or Shanghai or somewhere,’ he said
China’s crackdown in Hong Kong has left Japanese finance firms “very much afraid” and reconsidering whether to remain in the city, a senior banker said on Monday in a rare public declaration of concern from within the industry.
Yoshitaka Kitao, chief executive of financial conglomerate SBI Holdings, which runs Japan’s largest online brokerage, told the Financial Times he was planning to pull his company’s operations out of the southern Chinese city, arguing that “without freedom, there is no financial business”.
Other Japanese companies, he told the newspaper, were thinking about doing the same but were less willing to say so openly.
“They are unlike me. I’m a very straightforward guy. But all the others, in their bellies, they think they should move out or won’t invest more in Hong Kong,” Kitao said in an interview published on Monday.
