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Showing posts with label Shanghai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shanghai. Show all posts

Friday, September 1, 2023

US seeks more stable China business landscape

Relationship reset: Raimondo (centre) visiting Boeing Shanghai Aviation Service Co. In her meetings with Chinese officials, she raised the issue of unfair trade practices. — AFP


Shanghai: The United States wants to work with China to ensure a more “predictable” environment for American businesses in Shanghai, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told officials in the economic hub yesterday.

Speaking with Shanghai Communist Party chief Chen Jining on day four of a bridge-building trip to China, Raimondo said a “stable economic relationship is good for America, good for China and good for the world”.

“The US-China economic relationship is among the most consequential in the world,” she told Chen.

Raimondo told Chen she was looking forward to talks to “bring about a more predictable business environment, predictable regulatory environment, and a level playing field for American businesses here in Shanghai”.

US firms in China have long complained about what they see as an unfair business environment, with limited protection for intellectual property and preferential treatment afforded to domestic competitors.

Those fears have been compounded this year by a broad crackdown on US consulting firms operating in China.

A new anti-espionage law, which came into force on July 1, has also spooked foreign and domestic firms as they try to decipher authorities’ intentions and, crucially, pinpoint what is off-limits.

In a Tuesday meeting with Vice Premier He Lifeng in Beijing, Raimondo raised what Washington sees as unfair trade practices by China, according to a US Department of Commerce statement.

She also emphasised the “importance of strengthening the protection of trade secrets for US businesses operating in China”.

The commerce secretary is one of a number of senior US officials to visit China in recent months – part of an effort by Washington to improve its working relationship with its largest strategic rival.

Raimondo has used the trip to seek more open discussions with the Chinese over restrictive trade curbs and the two sides have agreed to set up a working group to iron out the laundry list of trade disputes between them. — AFP

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Tuesday, February 2, 2016

HSBC to freeze salaries, hiring in 2016 in battle to cut costs

 
Video: https://youtu.be/Q4V8L-98LVY  

Why Refusing a Pay Cut May Get You Fire?

HSBC Holdings Plc will impose a global hiring and pay freeze as part of its drive to cut as much as $5 billion in costs by the end of 2017.

The measures, which affect the consumer and investment banking businesses, were outlined in a memorandum received by employees on Friday, Gillian James, a spokeswoman for the bank, said Sunday in an e-mailed statement. Europe’s largest bank, which will release full-year earnings on Feb. 22, is mulling whether to move its headquarters away from London, partly because of the tax burden and tougher regulatory scrutiny.

“This is in line with HSBC’s moves to lower operating costs,” said Richard Cao, a Shenzhen-based analyst at Guotai Junan Securities Co. “HSBC can’t escape from the global economic slowdown and worsening asset quality like other global banks.”

HSBC Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver, 56, in June outlined a three-year plan to pare back a sprawling global network by shutting money-losing businesses and eliminate as many as 25,000 jobs as he seeks to boost profitability. Barclays Plc extended a freeze on hiring new staff indefinitely in December, while European lenders including Credit Suisse Group AG and Deutsche Bank AG are cutting thousands of jobs to shore up earnings.

The moves were reported earlier by Reuters.

The shares fell 1.6 percent to 484.25 pence at 10:10 a.m. in London, extending losses this year to about 9.6 percent. They dropped 12 percent in 2015.


Under its three-year plan, the London-based lender is seeking to reduce the number of full-time employees by between 22,000 and 25,000. In the U.K., the bank may eliminate as many as 8,000 jobs.

As part of its focus on more profitable markets, HSBC is reviewing its operations in Lebanon and may exit the Middle Eastern country, people with knowledge of the matter said earlier this month. The bank is closing its Indian private-banking business, people familiar with that move said in November.

HSBC is close to concluding an eight-month review into the best location for its headquarters, with Hong Kong seen as the leading candidate city. The lender is likely to stay based in London due to the vast logistics of relocating, Martin Gilbert, chief executive officer of Aberdeen Asset Management Plc, told Bloomberg Television in January. Aberdeen is one of the British bank’s biggest shareholders.- Bloomberg

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Jun 10, 2015 ... At the investment bank, HSBC plans to cut RWAs by a net $130-billion, or 31 per cent, while “keeping costs flat.” The global banking and ...
Aug 21, 2014 ... Nur Shila faces 12 principal charges in relation to transferring money from the HSBC Bank accounts to other bank accounts, theft, getting ...

Jul 18, 2012 ... HSBC concealed more than $US16 billion in sensitive transactions to Iran, ... SHAMED HSBC Bank executives have admitted to allowing Iran, ...
 
Aug 3, 2011 ... LONDON (MarketWatch) — A running tally of planned job cuts by European banks reached around 40,000 Tuesday, little more than halfway ...
Feb 28, 2012 ... HSBC's annual profits rose 15% to £13.8bn ($21.9bn) in what it called a year ... The bank said that 2011 was a year of major progress for HSBC.

Jul 31, 2012 ... The report criticised a “pervasively polluted” culture at the bank and said that HSBC's Mexican operations had moved US$7bil into the bank's ...
 
Jun 6, 2013 ... UK, European and Asian banks, on average, forecast losses of nearly 30% higher than ... HSBC, the largest British bank, has appointed former ...

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Shy boys given rooms to grow as they are lagging girls

Schoolboys do relaxation exercises in an all boys class at the government-run Shanghai Number Eight High School. Shanghai, whose school system produces the world's top test-scorers, has launched China's first all-boys high school program with an eye on elite overseas institutions like Eton. Source: AFP

SHANGHAI: Teenage boys in a Shanghai school are on the front line of teaching reform after the world's top-scoring education system introduced male-only classes over worries they are lagging girls.

Rows of white-shirted boys are put through their paces as they are called up individually to complete a chemical formula by teacher Shen Huimin, who hopes that a switch to male-only classes will help them overcome their reticence.

"We give boys a chance to change," she said.

The Shanghai school system topped the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's (OECD) worldwide assessment tests of 15-year-olds in 2009, the most recent available, ahead of Korea, Finland, Hong Kong and Singapore.

But even so officials are concerned that some male students may be slower than their female counterparts in development and certain academic areas, such as language, and the shift towards single sex classes aims to boost boys' confidence.

Girls do better than boys in secondary school across the developed world, an OECD report found.

A prominent Chinese educator, Sun Yunxiao, found the proportion of boys classed among the top scholars in the country's "gaokao" university entrance exams plunged from 66.2 percent to 39.7 percent between 1999 and 2008.

Across the developed world, girls do better than boys in secondary school, the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) found in a 2009 report on the educational performances of 15-year-olds.

"There are significant gender differences in educational outcomes," it said, adding that high school graduation rates across the OECD were 87 percent for girls but only 79 percent for boys.

In response, Shanghai's elite Number Eight High School is halfway through the initial year of an experiment, putting 60 boys into two classes of their own - a quarter of its first-year students - and teaching them with a special curriculum.

Schoolboys solve a math problem in an all boys class at the government-run Shanghai Number Eight High School in Shanghai.

 "This is a big breakthrough," said principal Lu Qisheng. "There's lots of hope - hope that boys will grow up better.

"Boys when they are young do not spend enough time studying," he explained. "Boys' maturity, especially for language and showing self-control, lags behind girls."

-- "We lack confidence" -

China shut most same-sex schools after the Communist Party came to power in 1949, and the only all-boys junior high schools in the country are privately run.

The number of male students scoring top marks in China's university entrance exams has plunged from 66 per cent to 49 per cent

Shanghai does have an all-girls state-run high school, the former McTyeire School for Girls, which marked its 120th anniversary last year and counts the three Soong sisters - Qing-ling, Ai-ling and Mei-ling - among its former pupils.

Between them they married two leaders and an industrialist. Qing-ling married Sun Yat-sen, the first President of the Republic of China, while Mei-ling wed Chiang Kai-shek, who would also later become president.

Student Li Zhongyang, 15, said he felt less shy about answering questions in his all-boys class, but drew hoots of laughter from his fellows by suggesting an absence of girls let them concentrate more on study.

"We lack confidence," he said. "The teachers like girls, who answer more questions in class. This programme lets us realise we are not worse than girls."

It is something of a contrast to males' traditionally dominant roles in Chinese culture, but principal Lu said the programme "doesn't have much relationship to equality in society".

The scheme was launched after China's government called for more "diversification" in educational choices within the state system.

A Peking University professor has called for an even bolder reform, suggesting in September that boys should start school one or two years later than girls.

"The Chinese education system needs to improve and allow various education methods," Wu Bihu said on his microblog. Now Lu hopes to create China's first all-boys school one day.

"Ten or twenty years ago, there was no need for an all-boys class - just put everyone together," he said.

In an increasingly aspirational society, he added, some families saw the new programme as having connotations of top overseas private schools, and so promising an advantage in the highly competitive gaokao.

"The parents know: England has Eton," he said. - AFP

Thursday, May 31, 2012

China, Japan to launch yuan-yen direct trading

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Trade between Asia's two largest economies is about to get a whole lot easier. China's central bank confirmed Tuesday that the country will allow the direct trading of its currency against the Japanese yen starting Friday.



This makes the yen the first major currency besides the US dollar that can be directly traded with the RMB. The move is part of efforts made by China and Japan to strengthen cooperation in trade and financial markets. And it’s a huge step forward for the internationalization of the yuan.

After some excitement in the Asian markets yesterday. The People’s Bank of China confirmed on Tuesday that China and Japan will start to directly trade their currencies in Shanghai and Tokyo from June 1. The move will shore up trade and financial ties between Asia’s two biggest economies, and also marks another step to raise the yuan’s international role.

Japanese Finance Minister Jun Azumi, who announced the decision in Tokyo, stressed the cost benefits behind the move.

Azumi said, "By conducting transactions without using a third country’s currency, it will bring merits of reducing transaction costs and lowering risks involved in settlements at financial institutions. It will also contribute to improving convenience of both countries’ currencies and reinvigorate the Tokyo market."

The step eliminates the US dollar’s monopoly position to set the exchange rate between the two currencies, and follows a deal struck by the leaders of the two countries in December.

Experts say it’s an important move towards the internationalization of China’s yuan currency.

Professor Ding Zhijie, dean of School of Banking & Finance, UIBE, said, "It raises the convertibility of the yuan. And I believe the yuan trading will be accepted by more Asian economies as well as the international markets. It will also push forward the internationalization of the yuan."

Several banks in the two countries, including Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and Bank of China, will start the direct trading.

Huang Jiaying, trade with Bank of China said, "The move will likely make the yuan accepted by more Japanese investors as well. It will also help boost the possibility of the yuan becoming an internationally-settled currency, which is an important move of propelling the yuan to become an international reserve currency."

And Japan, which in March pledged to buy about 10 billion US dollars of Chinese government debt, is the first economy to connect with China’s yuan. The move is likely to strengthen ties with its biggest
trading partner.

Japan, China to shore up yen/yuan trade
Japan, China to shore up yen/yuan trade

Japan and China will start trading their currencies directly in Tokyo and Shanghai from June 1 in a move that shores up trade and financial ties between Asia's two biggest economies and also marks another baby step to raise the yuan's international role.

The step eliminates the use of the dollar to set the exchange rate and follows an agreement struck by the leaders of the two countries in December, which also involves Japan buying Chinese government debt and efforts to forge a free trade pact between China, Japan and South Korea.

"This is part of China's broader strategy to reduce dependence on the dollar. The yen has been chosen because of large trade flows between the two countries," said Dariusz Kowalczyk, senior economist and strategist at Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong.

"Volumes of currency trading on shore are small, but this could lead to an expansion of trading with other currencies. It would be easier for China to expand into other Asian currencies."

Japanese Finance Minister Jun Azumi, who announced the decision in Tokyo, stressed the cost benefits of the move.

"By conducting transactions without using the third country's currency, it will bring merits of reducing transaction costs and lowering risks involved in settlements at financial institutions," Azumi told reporters after a cabinet meeting.

The People's Bank of China noted benefits for mutual trade, but also tied the decision to China's drive to boost the use of the yuan as a settlement currency for trade and financial transactions.

"Developing the direct yuan/yen trading will help form the direct yuan/yen exchange rate and reduce the trading cost for entities and promote the use of the yuan and yen in bilateral trade and investment as well as help strengthen financial cooperation between the two countries," it said in a statement.

A separate statement issued by the China Foreign Exchange Trade System said it will provide a market-making system for direct yuan/yen trading.

Until now yen-yuan rates were calculated on the basis of their respective rates against the dollar, so the move is expected to narrow trading spreads, lower transaction costs and allow more trade deals to be settled directly.

For Japan, which in March pledged to buy about $10 billion of Chinese government debt, becoming the first major economy to do so, the move could strengthen ties with its biggest trading partner.

Despite sometimes rancorous political ties between the two neighbours, Japan's economic fortunes are increasingly tied to China's economic growth and consumer demand.

Dealers in Shanghai said the near-term effect would be probably higher trading volumes and lower costs.

"Direct yuan-yen trading is likely to cut trading costs, boosting yuan-yen trading liquidity," said a dealer at a foreign bank. "Most yuan trading against the yen now goes through the dollar, because traders refer to dollar-yuan value to price yen-yuan."

But some played down the broader impact.

"From what I can see, it doesn't actually include any opening up of the capital account at all. It just allows a direct cross to be traded rather than actually increasing the amount of flow that can happen onshore to offshore," Dominic Bunning, currency strategist at HSCB in Hong Kong, said.

"It seems to be more of a technical issue rather than a major development."

The move to facilitate yen-yuan trading and the debt deal are part of Beijing's long-term efforts to elevate the yuan's status as an international currency, which so far have mainly centred on China's promotion of the yuan to settle trade.

Beijing has struck agreements with several nations from Malaysia to Belarus and Argentina on the use of the yuan in trade and other transactions. It has expanded a pilot programme started in 2009 into a nationwide one allowing firms to settle their trade in yuan.

The result has been a relative surge in the use of the currency. More than 9%of China's total trade was settled in yuan in 2011, up from just 0.7% in 2010.

Few argue against the idea that the yuan will one day become a reserve currency, given World Bank predictions that China will overtake the United States as the world's top economy before 2030. But to achieve that the yuan would need to become fully convertible and Beijing has yet to indicate any timetable for reaching that stage.- Reuters


Friday, December 9, 2011

Go East, Young Entrepreneur!



Rebecca Fannin, Contributor

Rebecca Fannin
Mid-career U.S. and European professionals in their 30s and 40s are making it in China and can’t get enough of the place.
 

Qunar founder Fritz Demopoulos at Silicon Dragon Beijing 2011 >

Fritz Demopoulos, 43, a Southern Californian and MBA grad from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management hasn’t mastered Mandarin, but has scored two Chinese Internet successes over the past decade. In June 2011, Baidu invested $306 million in the travel search engine Qunar he formed in 2005 and he stepped down as CEO, turning management over to Chinese staff. Demopoulos, who was born in the U.S. to a Greek dad and Austrian mother, got his start in China as business development manager for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., working alongside Wendi Deng in the late 1990s in Hong Kong and mainland China, and running information technology portal Chinabyte.com. He next joined NASDAQ-listed Chinese portal and gaming company Netease and worked closely with the CEO on a two-year turnaround. In 2001, his first China startup, sports portal Shawei, was bought by Hong Kong-based Tom Group for $15 million.

With his credentials, Demopoulos could write his ticket. He’s exploring opportunities to start another business or become an active investor, and plans to continue working in either Hong Kong or Beijing. “I don’t think I will be based at the debtor to China, ie the U.S.,” he says.

Richard Robinson, 43, hails from Boston and still drops the “r’s” with his accent though he’s long ago broken through the language and cultural barrier on a whirlwind tech startup career in China. His journey has led from helping to jumpstart the original Rupert Murdoch-funded Renren to a VP at wireless and entertainment player Linktone to spearheading seven startups in wireless technologies – and even running his Beijinger wife’s venture, Kooky Panda, a mini-Zynga mobile social gaming business, on a miniscule $40,000 budget before Infinity Ventures funded it. “In China, you can live on a penny and a big dream,” notes Robinson, who points out that burn rates or monthly costs to ramp up a business in China are about one-tenth of those in Silicon Valley.



The latest gig for the hyperkinetic Robinson is heading up international for Beijing startup Youlu, a mobile phone address book that leverages social network connections. Youlu’s CEO is rock star Zany Zeng, the former chief technology officer at China’s Facebook-plus site, Oak Pacific Interactive . “I really feel we have lightning in a bottle with this one,” he says.

Spurred on by seeing his friends and colleagues venture over to China and succeed, Silicon Valley tech executive Elliott Ng found he could not resist the lure to go eastward. In early 2011, the overachiever ‒ Harvard MBA grad, ex- Microsoft product manager, McKinsey associate, co-founder or director of four tech startups, and angel investor – joined Google to lead product management for Greater China. He’d lived in the Bay Area for 14 years, his wife had a full-time job as a pediatrician, and their three young boys were pretty happy where they were.

But in July, he and his family relocated to Beijing. “Silicon Valley is still the best, most open startup/tech ecosystem in the world,” says Ng. “Beijing is the center of Chinese culture, government and information technology.” The one drawback? Polluted Beijing air.

Family reasons have kept social media goddess and Taiwanese native Christine Lu from making the break herself. The 35-year-old single mother has her support network in Los Angeles for her six-year-old son, and she’s managing to stay very involved as an entrepreneur at the intersection connecting China and the U.S.

Her latest adventure is Affinity China, a private network that provides members access to unique luxury, lifestyle and travel experiences – an area that matches her interests well as a shareholder in two swanky Shanghai cocktail bars, CVRVE and M1NT.  She’s had some grass-roots experience in China as well, designing and launching two clothing lines for her family’s apparel business in the Mainland, launching an e-commerce site for women during the dotcom days, and working in Shanghai for five years from 1999 to 2004 as head of marketing for TV Shopping Network.

Her conversational Mandarin is a plus and quarterly trips to Shanghai keep her plugged into what’s happening. “If it wasn’t for my parents forcing me to visit China for the first time in 1995 as a freshman in college, I would be late to the China game today playing catch up. That trip changed everything. The entire city was under construction. There was no skyline in Pudong. There was no expressway to the airport,” recalls Lu. “But there was an energy, a feeling that in ten years, things were going to be much different . . . and I wanted to be part of it.”

Since moving to China in 1997 to study Chinese at Shanghai’s East China Normal University and marrying a Chinese woman he’d met on campus, suave Parisian native Bruno Bensaid, 39, has not looked in the rear view mirror. After working in finance for Cisco Systems from Singapore, he moved back to Shanghai and managed a tech accelerator that launched several venture-backed mobile startups from France in China, then joined French venture firm Ventech to do China deals, and in 2008, started his financial advisory group ShanghaiVest in 2008.

He’s well rooted in the tech community as a founder of the Shanghai chapter of industry networking group MobileMonday and an angel investor with Shanghai’s tuned-in AngelVest. “I’m very involved in business development with the startups I invest in,” says Bensaid, who’s recently backed a luxury travel network, a mobile apps engine for kids and a social marketing company with an all-star team.

Robert Strawbridge, 42, grew up on Long Island’s North Shore and spent summers in Newport, Rhode Island and Maine, later moving to San Francisco in time to ride the dotcom boom as IPOs were soaring. In 2008, he left behind his Cape Cod style home overlooking the Bay and rented an apartment in Beijing to catch the next big trend. A Hambrecht & Quist alum from the mid-1990s who later co-founded a sportswear manufacturer and worked as a VP at a Zurich investment bank, Strawbridge launched Beijing-anchored Sea Cliff Capital International in 2008.

The boutique merchant banking firm specializes in cross-border transactions with a focus on assisting clean tech and energy-related companies expand into China and raise capital. Strawbridge, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps for five years and was a combat diver, likens his China experience to “deployment” and says he’s in Beijing for the long haul.

As excerpted from Startup Asia (Wiley, Oct. 2011) by Rebecca A. Fannin

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