OCBC’s Tsien: “Is OCBC an underperforming stock?”

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Published on March 23, 2021
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OCBC’s Tsien: “Is OCBC an underperforming stock?”

Samuel Tsien, OCBC Group Chief Executive Officer, talks about the company’s shares and its indications of growth.

The following is the edited transcript:

The graph here shows the share price per share. It is better to look at the market cap, primarily because we have script dividends multiple times because we wanted to allow our shareholders to be able to participate in the continued growth of the company by taking their dividend shares, so that increased our share outstanding quite a bit over the past few years. That was also a period of time when we did the rights issue of $3 billion to help the bank to acquire Wing Hang, to fund the Wing Hang Bank’s acquisition. So the share price itself, by looking at per share, may not be entirely indicative of the growth that we were able to achieve for our shareholders. If we look at the market cap, I think it will be better. If we look at the past one year, our market cap increased by slightly over 40%. So that indicates that the growth is really there. And it's rewarded by the customers, by the shareholders.

Another thing that I would like to point out is that our diversification is not yet fully appreciated by the investors’ market. The diversification of ourselves is very broad.

We have three business pillars, we have commercial banking, we have wealth management as a separate pillar, and then we have insurance. Now each of these business pillars will have its ups and downs. For example, our insurance portfolio will be more subject to market impacts than the other businesses. We also have diversification into four countries: into Greater China — now very important for us — Singapore's still the largest market, Malaysia and Indonesia. These types of diversification really helped us in times of crisis, like what we saw on 2020.

For the full transcript and video, visit: https://bit.ly/3rq1LrP