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SINGAPORE: Standard Chartered Bank is seeing its business in Singapore grow. It booked some S$1 billion in operating profit in Singapore last year, up by 17 per cent from 2008.
StanChart said wholesale banking and consumer banking were the two main drivers of earnings growth.
Standard Chartered is branching into new areas in Singapore and it promises new, exciting developments in the pipeline for its business in the city-state.
Ray Ferguson, regional chief executive, Standard Chartered, said: "Over the last several months, we've built our equities platform Standard Chartered Securities. We've done a major rights issue for Capital Commercial Trust. We've done secondary placements for Ascendas REIT and for the Noble Group.
“More excitingly, we have our first IPO that we are going to do in Singapore in the pipeline. Obviously I can't tell you who is that going to be but that is coming up shortly."
Last year, revenue from Singapore rose by 21 per cent on year to S$2.3 billion. That's on the back of strong contributions from wholesale and consumer banking.
Revenue from wholesale banking jumped by 37 per cent to S$1.4 billion while revenue from consumer banking grew some three per cent. Consumer banking revenue grew three per cent to over S$920 million.
Expenses increased 21 per cent to S$1.2 billion due to expenditure in its wholesale banking business, in particular new products, staff productivity and infrastructure projects.
Amid the improving economic outlook, StanChart said it will remain cautious about its forecast for 2010.
Mr Ferguson said: "We have what is clearly a big problem with continued unemployment in Western Europe and the US. And we got the unintended consequences of some of the potential banking regulation changes. It all comes together to make quite an uncertain outlook on the global level."
Standard Chartered booked a five per cent climb on Wednesday in net profit for 2009 overall.
It also said it was planning to list in Mumbai in the first half of this year. - CNA/vm
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