汇丰银行应停止折腾

飞雪寒冰

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.
欧智华(Stuart Gulliver)留在英国缴税的决定，应该只有英国税务及海关总署(HM Revenue and Customs)才会感兴趣。对于汇丰(HSBC)的投资者而言，更重要的是这位新任首席执行官别再出尔反尔。过去一年半的反复折腾，往好了说是不光彩，往坏了说是具有破坏性。

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.
当欧智华的前任——纪勤(Michael Geoghegan)说，他将在2009年9月与十几位来自集团战略部的高层一同迁往香港时，汇丰曾大谈特谈“世界经济重心的转移”。这没有变。但尽管受到中国的庇护，过去几年，汇丰在中国内地的分支网络的扩张速度，却没比花旗集团(Citigroup)快多少。外资银行在中国银行业资产中所占份额继续下滑，去年可能已不到2%。在上海上市的计划仍然只是个计划。

飞雪寒冰

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.
迁移之举没有攻克堡垒，而是引发了管理层的分歧。去年秋季做戏后，汇丰银行19位董事会成员中的5名董事，以及9名业务负责人，如今都扮演着不熟悉的角色。这让专注于新兴市场的汇丰在本该全速前进时，却处在了劣势。即便是在令人头疼的美国消费业务（去年头9个月亏损19亿美元，平均资产总额为840亿美元）上，贷款损失准备金的下降速度也比净利息收入更快。尽管券商联手行动，以推高汇丰股价——“买入”与“卖出”比为13比1，但以市净率计算，汇丰股价仍比全球20家市值最大银行中的大多数都便宜。这其实就是“治理折价”。欧智华最紧迫的任务就是消除这种折价。