Credit Suisse is paring back its plans for Asia. While it’s still hiring heavily in private banking, it’s also cutting costs to fund that hiring, and has reduced its 2018 Asian revenue target from CHF2.1bn to a more diminutive CHF1.6bn,
So, what’s going wrong? Chirantan Barua, an analyst at Bernstein Research, says it’s simple: Credit Suisse’s Asian business is too small.
Barua sums up Credit Suisse’s APAC strategy as, ‘bank a customer throughout the IB lifecycle (from providing the financing to taking them to IPO) and then make them a privae banking client for life going forwards.’
Barua says that might work if Credit Suisse a) had a big APAC banking business and b) had a strong presence in China.
It has neither. Witness the charts below.
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Photo credit: Shanghai Evening by Bernd Thaller is licensed under CC BY 2.0.