HSBC Holdings has reported that its profit after tax increased by $0.8 billion to $9.2 billion; profit before tax decreased by $1.7 billion to $9.2 billion and revenue decreased marginally to $25.2 billion, primarily due to foreign currency translation impacts and 1H22 losses on planned business disposals.
Noel Quinn, Group Chief Executive, HSBC, said: “We have continued to manage our cost base with discipline. Our sustained investment to digitise HSBC at scale has helped make us a more agile and efficient organisation. Our hybrid working model has enabled us to reduce our office real estate footprint by around a third since the start of 2020. At the same time, rising customer demand for digital products and services has enabled us to keep reducing and adapting our branch network in response to changing customer behaviour. We continue to invest in areas of strength. Our investment to boost our Asia wealth product and platform capabilities helped us to attract strong levels of net new invested assets, and to grow the value of new business in our insurance franchise in Asia by 41% on last year’s first-half. Our transformation agenda has been based around three things: reshaping our portfolio, increasing our capital efficiency and tightly managing our costs.”