Investors voted on the proposal at the bank’s annual general meeting in Birmingham, central England, but supporters of the call for division and restructuring ultimately failed to win the required majority.
The bank’s current management had urged shareholders to vote against the proposal.
The vote comes at the end of a week in which the bank recorded an increase in its quarterly net profits, supported by higher interest rates and its bailout of the British branch of the American bank “Silicon Valley”. .
Addressing the Birmingham meeting, HSBC chairman Mark Tucker insisted the proposal to split the bank would not help.
“We concluded that the alternative structural options would destroy shareholder value, including putting earnings at risk, and that remains our unanimous view today,” he said.
But among minority investors, Ping An, who owns more than 8% of HSBC, says the bank is lagging behind its international peers and that the bank’s recent improvement in results is linked to interest rates. higher, which seem to have peaked.
The US Federal Reserve signaled this week that it would end its policy of raising borrowing costs aimed at calming inflation.
Meanwhile, the European Central Bank issued a lower-than-recent interest rate hike on Thursday as rising borrowing costs begin to take their toll, but said it had more time and efforts to fight aggressive rate hikes.
Recently, Michael Huang, Chairman and CEO of Ping An, said, “It is imperative that HSBC undertakes structural reform to fundamentally address the bank’s key market competitiveness issues.
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Ping An called on HSBC to undertake a “strategic restructuring” that would lead to the creation of a listed bank based in Hong Kong.
Huang said the proposal would have allowed HSBC to retain control of separate businesses in Asia, adding that the bank’s management had “exaggerated many of the costs and risks” associated with the split.
The bank was among a number of major banks that canceled dividend payments at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, following instructions from the Bank of England, a move that angered some investors from Hong Kong.
By contrast, the shareholders’ meeting on Friday was met with protests from demonstrators in favor of climate issues, a common feature this year at annual general meetings of major British companies.
And environmentalists are pressuring banks to stop funding fossil fuel projects, arguing that as long as they continue to do so, their promises to help tackle climate change are a dead letter.
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