Reports
Restructuring Standard Chartered Looking To Offload Asian Assets
The bank, which is restructuring operations, is eyeing the option of selling Asian assets, a report said.
Standard Chartered, the UK-listed bank that earns the bulk of its revenues in regions such as Asia, wants to sell at least $4.4 billion of assets in Asia, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources. The lender is restructuring its balance sheet after booking record impairments.
The news service said Standard Chartered is speaking with potential buyers for about $1.4 billion of stressed loans made to Indian firms including GMR Infrastructure. The bank has also started a sale of around $3 billion of assets in the rest of Asia. Those assets include loans as well as proprietary bond and equity investments in China, Indonesia and Malaysia.
The news story made no mention of Standard Chartered's private banking operations.
In a statement emailed to this publication, the bank said: “We said in November when we announced our strategic review that we would be aligning our risk profile to the new strategy, and confirmed then that the group had identified a number of exposures for liquidation that exceeded the new risk tolerance levels. We are making good progress on executing our strategy, and we will provide an update to our investors in due course.”
In February, Standard Chartered reported a pre-tax loss of $1.5 billion for 2015 – its first annual loss since 1989 – at the hands of challenging market conditions and restructuring charges of $1.8 billion.
The bank reported a 15 per cent per cent year-on-year fall in income to $15.4 billion and an 84 per cent plunge in underlying pre-tax profit to $800 million. It attributed the “poor” performance to lower commodity prices, muted trade volumes, stock market volatility, and emerging market currency weakness against the US dollar.
In November last year, chief executive Bill Winters, who took the helm in June, revealed plans to cut 15,000 jobs by 2018 and raised £3.3 billion ($5.1 billion) in capital to help create a “lean, focused and well capitalised international bank”.
