UBS Can Ride Out the 'Pig' Controversy
The Swiss bank has a market-leading business managing Chinese money offshore, and many clients are locked into the relationship.
Waiting for things to blow over.
Photographer: Matthew Lloyd/Bloomberg
Expect “Pig-gate” to blow over. UBS Group AG’s ultra-rich Chinese clients are unlikely to desert the Swiss bank for local rivals, whatever the level of outrage over language used by its chief economist in a research report last week.
The bank's potential loss of Chinese share-sale mandates isn’t a critical blow: UBS ranks a distant 11th in underwriting Hong Kong IPOs in 2019. (The bank fell behind after a one-year ban by the Securities and Futures Commission over deficiencies in its work on three companies that ran into trouble after listing.) Nor is the loss of bond mandates, such as its exclusion from a sale by state-owned China Railway Construction Corp.