[SHANGHAI] JPMorgan Chase chief executive officer Jamie Dimon said his firm is committed to long-term investments in China, despite tension between the governments of the world’s two biggest economies.
“We’re a long term investor here,” he said in a Bloomberg TV interview at the lender’s Global China Summit in Shanghai. “Yes, there’s all these other issues causing consternation, but we have to deal with the world that we have, not the world we want, and we’ll continue to grow.”
Dimon conceded that there is rising pressure on the US firm when dealing in the world’s second-biggest economy, as well as other countries, amid tariff hikes and national security concerns. Still, he pointed to China’s rapid innovation and sustained global interest as reasons the firm is not stepping back.
“The consensus is that companies are going to be doing business here,” he said. “There could be some adjustments because of the trade negotiations, but I don’t think the American government wants to leave China,” he said. “We’re getting pressure from governments everywhere about everything. We try to answer them all rationally and serve our clients.”
His comments come after US Defense Department added Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd to a blacklist of companies with alleged links to the Chinese military and the US House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party called for two US banks – Bank of America and JPMorgan to withdraw from working on its listing in Hong Kong. Both firms decided to stick with the deal.
JPMorgan underwrote CATL’s listing despite opposition from US lawmakers, given that Washington has not placed sanctions on the Chinese battery maker. “If we thought it was wrong, we wouldn’t do it,” Dimon said.
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CATL, as the electric-vehicle battery maker is known, debuted its Hong Kong shares this week in the world’s biggest listing of the year, raising US$5.2 billion.
“The government did not sanction CATL. There are people who did not want us to do it for a bunch of reasons, and they may have somewhat legitimate reasons,” he said. “We and other investment banks did a lot of due diligence around all the issues that people raised.”
He added the bank will follow US government direction. “If they had told us we couldn’t, I would salute, move on,” he said.
In recent years, the lender has reshuffled leadership and cut jobs in China and Hong Kong, acknowledging that the expansion was taking longer than anticipated. Wall Street firms have overall reduced their combined China exposure, which includes lending, trading and investments, slumping by about fifth.
Now there are signs of business picking up, with increased share sales in Hong Kong and mainland China. Chinese leaders have also reiterated commitments to their financial opening and unleashed stimulus to get the economy back on track. Markets have recovered after Beijing and Washington agreed on a 90-day truce on some of the highest tariffs.
Rita Chan, co-senior country officer for China, earlier told Bloomberg she is seeing a broad-based recovery in the country and growing interest from foreign investors seeking to diversify, as the global tariff regime drives portfolio shifts and fuels an expansion overseas by Chinese firms.
“The development in the last 12 months have definitely been encouraging,” Chan said. “We have seen a broad based recovery in liquidity in volumes.”
The bank is seeing “very good momentum” and the trend of Chinese local corporate clients going overseas and internationalising hasn’t changed, she said. “The cross-border services that are required to navigate this complicated environment is definitely increasing.”
JPMorgan has poured significant resources into building out its China business, and is the only Wall Street bank that attained full control of its futures, securities and asset management businesses in China in a short span of three years.
The lender is also bullish on other parts of Asia. Speaking to Bloomberg TV in Shanghai, Sjoerd Leenart, the bank’s Asia-Pacific CEO, said it expects growth in the region to be well above the global average, with “enormous opportunities” in Japan.
In India, “the current leadership is giving investors the confidence that they will continue on the same path,” Leenart said. Still, “there’s a long way to go” as the country’s economy is much smaller than China.
JPMorgan’s Asia-Pacific operations generated US$12 billion net revenue last year, a 13 per cent increase from 2023. BLOOMBERG