The secretive Chinese billionaire is trying to “split” HSBC
In the group of Chinese tycoons, there are three “ma’s” who are in the top positions. Jack Ma – founder of Alibaba, Pony Ma – boss of Tencent and chairman of Ping An insurance group – Peter Ma has built the world’s largest companies, and brought himself a total fortune of up to ten thousand dollars. tens of billions of dollars. However, Peter Ma, the major shareholder behind HSBC’s restructuring request last week, has always been the most secretive of all.
But that changed when Binh An, the largest investor in HSBC with a 9.2% stake, made a surprise move when it asked the lender to separate the two branches of operations in Europe. Asia and the West: arguably the biggest restructuring in HSBC’s 157-year history. This is even more unexpected because Binh An insurance company was once a subsidiary of HSBC.
Peter Ma – leader of Binh An
Stepping into the public spotlight is not easy for Peter Ma, the 67-year-old leader who founded Binh An in 1988. Since then, he has turned his company into one of two companies. The largest insurance company in the world, with a market capitalization of up to 116.7 billion USD. Unlike the other two billionaires surnamed Ma, he rarely appears in public, almost never gives interviews and his business is not under the scrutiny of the Beijing government or the Chinese media. A Hong Kong-based financial expert who knows Peter Ma told the Financial Times: “He is a hidden player who does not like glitz. He trained himself to be quiet. He understood that he was on a ship of which he was not the captain.”
Under the watchful eye of Beijing officials, Mr. Ma created the modern insurance industry in China. When Ping An was first established, the country had no insurance industry and in the city of Shenzhen, where the company was located, at that time it was only farmland. Even though the Chinese people at that time were afraid to talk about life and death, Mr. Ma overcomes cultural barriers and sells many life insurance packages. At that time, the existence of a private company was so foreign to Chinese people that when he went to sell goods, his employees had to carry a copy of the company’s operating license to avoid being caught. Mistake is a scam.
Ping An is one of the largest insurance companies in China
Yet just three decades later, Binh An has more than 360 thousand employees and 220 million customers, almost covering the Chinese market. Building a business to this extent requires high political sensitivity. Mr. Ma has tried to steer Ping’an away from the control of China’s state-owned bank, which is the company’s majority shareholder, and turn it into an independent business. After that, he attracted foreign investment and opened the door for foreign investors such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and HSBC to buy shares in the company. Ping An subsequently became the first financial institution in China with foreign investors, and in 2004 was the largest company by market capitalization on the Hong Kong exchange.
The core philosophy of Binh An is to harmonize the cultures of East and West. Ma’s collection of articles on the company’s history entitled Language from the Heart of Ping An describes the company’s building on both the philosophies of Confucius and Albert Einstein. Even bronze statues of these two great men are located in the main hall of Ping An’s training school located in Shenzhen. According to a source from the Financial Times, the decision to buy back HSBC shares – a bank with a long history connecting Asia – Europe – stemmed from a conversation between Mr. Ma and his longtime friend Mark Tucker, the bank’s chairman. and is currently the chairman of AIA Insurance Group.
But even as his ambitions expand into areas such as banking, blockchain, wealth management or traffic management with intense acquisition campaigns, Ma is adamant that it is only for the domestic market. . In 2018, in an interview with the Financial Times, he shared that Ping An was “one of the most international Chinese companies”, but rejected the idea of expanding abroad. An acquaintance of his told the newspaper: “He is playing politics, presenting himself as someone focused on the domestic market.” According to this person, Mr. Ma actually wants the company to be more international. Although Peter Ma is a graduate student at Wuhan University and co-director of the company, Jessica Tan studied at MIT and worked for 10 years at McKinsey.
His decision to remain silent turned out to be wise, when looking at the fate of tycoons like Jack Ma being punished by Beijing for overstepping their powers. “This Ma is very wise about the actual situation of modern China,” the source said. Billionaires face constant suspicion from China. Notable examples include the 2018 arrest of an insurance company executive, and Ant Financial’s halted IPO in 2020.
Close attachment to the government can become a somewhat defensive step. In an effort to reduce systemic risks, Chinese authorities have put high capital requirements on financial groups “too big to fail”: if Ping’an is too closely monitored, Mr. Ma and his fortune will be in the hands of the government. The company is also under financial pressure following a disastrous investment in China Fortune Land, which caused a loss of $6.5 billion in revenue last year. The company’s share price has also halved since early 2021.
Ma’s change of attitude towards HSBC has probably been approved by Beijing. The attempt to put a domestic power in control of the bank parallels China’s grand economic plan to break away from dependence on the West.
at Blogtuan.info – Source: cafebiz.vn – Read the original article here
