South Korea’s financial regulators are not expected to approve HSBC’s $6.3bn acquisition of Korea Exchange Bank in time for an April deadline, raising doubts about the group’s plans to expand in Asia’s third-largest banking market.
HSBC’s offer to buy a 51 per cent stake in KEB from Lone Star, the US private equity group, will expire on April 30 if it has not been approved by regulators. But officials at South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Commission said they did not expect any decision to be made by then. “[We are] looking at the application, but we are not likely to make any decision by the deadline,” a senior FSC official in the banking division said.
HSBC, which is due to report results for 2007 today, is under pressure from investors to focus on emerging markets after suffering heavy losses in its consumer lending operations in the US.
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