Shinhan Financial Group Co., Ltd. (NYSE:SHG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So considering all these factors I think we will be able to maintain the policies that we announced earlier this year for the shareholders.

Operator: The next question. We will just allow some time for the next question to come in. The next question will be from White Oak Capital, [indiscernible]. Please ask your question.

Unidentified Analyst: Hi, thanks for taking my question. I have two. One, if you could comment on your strategy of expansion outside Korea, how much capital we should expect you to allocate outside Korea over the next three years, that would be very helpful? And what businesses, which countries should we expect this capital allocation to go to? And the second question is more at a system level. We know recently there has been high household debt to GDP levels in Korea. To what level should this ratio fall for us to expect loan growth again comfortably? Thank you.

Park Cheol Woo: Thank you for the question. Please allow some time for the question to be answered. Yes, I think there were two questions. There was first question on the global business and the shareholder return on asset growth. I would like to provide an overall answer. And then for the detailed asset growth on the Bank side, the Bank CFO will answer. For the global business, there’s the advanced markets and we have the emerging markets. For the advanced markets as our companies are making inroads and through those markets, we’re trying to support them in our policies as well. For large corporations and in in cooperation with many companies in Korea, we’re continuing to pursue those initiatives. For emerging markets in order to increase our income we are looking at opportunities to seek and we’re trying to expand our footprint there as well.

As we well know, in Vietnam, we are seeing good growth. I think it’s the same for Korea and other countries as well. Recently there has been re rate hikes and also in an economic slowdown. So all countries are looking at delinquency rate increasing and of course in emerging markets we’re observing the same situation, but we have the risk management experience in the past that we could refer to. So we will be looking at that for preemptive risk management. Under that, we are looking at how we can just expand our footprint physically, but also looking at how we could grow further in the areas that we have already established our businesses. Even if we are going to make additional expansions, we are going to look at how we cannot rather do organic growth, but if there are high growth potential areas, we may be looking at options to make equity investments.

But until now we haven’t had any specific targets. And in terms of our asset growth for total shareholder return in the earliest start of the year for shareholder return for asset growth, we said that we were trying to support that. And under that asset growth policy, we’re trying to grow our assets accordingly. For retail loans and the bank asset book, the Bank CFO will take the answer.