Stuart Gulliver’s decision to pay tax in the UK should be of interest only to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. What matters more to HSBC investors is that the new chief executive sticks to it. The to-ing and fro-ing of the past year and a half has been unedifying at best, and destructive at worst.
When Mr Gulliver’s predecessor, Michael Geoghegan, said he was relocating to Hong Kong in September 2009, along with a dozen or so princelings from group strategy, HSBC made a lot of noise about a “shift in the world’s centre of economic gravity.” That is as true as it ever was. But for all its Chinese patronage, the Big Elephant has expanded its mainland branch network at about the same rate as Citigroup over the past couple of years. Foreign banks’ aggregate share of domestic banking assets, probably less than 2 per cent last year, continues to fall. The plan to list shares in Shanghai remains just that.
Rather than opening up the fortress, the move simply opened up divisions in management. Following last autumn’s histrionics, five of HSBC’s 19-strong board of directors and nine business heads are now in unfamiliar roles. That has put the emerging markets-focused bank at a disadvantage, when it should be powering ahead. Even in the dreadful US consumer business, which lost $1.9bn in the first nine months on average total assets of $84bn, provisions for credit losses are falling faster than net interest income. But despite a concerted campaign from brokers to push the stock higher – “buys” outnumber “sells” by 13 to one – HSBC still trades more cheaply, on a price/book basis, than more than half of the world’s top 20 banks by market capitalisation. That is a governance discount as much as anything else. Mr Gulliver’s most urgent task is to close it.