Despite a challenging 2011, Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management’s North Asia team is reporting a solid year’s performance, leveraging its One Bank philosophy to offer clients a full range of investment services

While the sovereign debt crises and downgrades in Europe and US corporates continue to dominate the headlines in 2011, with the subsequent subdued demand for exports from key growth markets such as China, rising concerns of an Asian contagion – one thing that holds through is the resolve of the Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management’s (PWM) team to continue steering a steady course in navigating its high net worth clients through the volatile markets.

Deutsche Bank’s North Asia Head of Private Wealth Management, Lok Yim, says despite the challenges of 2011, the private banking franchise continues to stand in good stead and its success will pave the way for even better growth for the business in 2012.

“The key to this success has been our ability to proactively offer creative and non-traditional solutions to clients across a wide range of products assessing risk, returns, hedging and cross-asset correlations in order to focus and drive wealth creation; all of which have enabled us to strongly grow client assets in 2011.”

From its original store in Causeway Bay 15 years ago, the innovative retailer and its president are getting recognition 

For Thomas Woo, the President of the Hong Kong-based retail chain city’super, 2011 was a remarkable year. Not only was he marking fifteen years since successfully founding the high-end gourmet food and lifestyle group, he was awarded the prestigious ‘Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2011 China’ for the Consumer Products Category.

Woo shares with The PEAK the keys to his success and reveals details of his ambitious plans for expansion in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

“Since the establishment of city’super, our vision has been to become a global retailer focused on satisfying the lifestyle demands of our cosmopolitan customers. With a unique business concept that greatly differed from the conventional supermarket industry at the time, we have achieved phenomenal growth and constantly strive to remain innovative,” says Hong Kong-born Woo, who assumed his current role in 2002.

One of the world’s leading research centres for bioscience, the University of California, San Francisco is looking for collaboration and students from China and Hong Kong

Hong Kong and San Francisco have always possessed strong links. The west coast city is home to the oldest Chinatown in North America dating from 1848 and many Hong Kong Chinese descended on the city in the 1960s to develop one of the most authentic Chinatowns outside Asia.

Educationally, the two cities also share a common thread, with many Hong Kong Chinese choosing to study in the ‘City by the Bay’. The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), for example, currently has more than 187 postdoctoral scholars from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, which represents almost 20 per cent of all UCSF postdoctoral scholars.

To identify potential areas of collaboration between UCSF and other leading Hong Kong institutions, the chancellor of the university, Susan Desmond-Hellman, recently visited Hong Kong with UCSF professor and Nobel Laureate Dr Elizabeth Blackburn and three other professors, Margaret Tempero, Shaw Prize recipient Yuet Wai Kan plus Regis Kelly from the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences.

If you find yourself, perhaps your child, suddenly ill or endangered in a far flung place, who are you going to call?

At the alarm centre in the International SOS office in Hong Kong teams of doctors and ex-military security experts are on call around the clock, managing a world-wide network of medical facilities and security operations and, in grave circumstances, evacuation teams.

The Regional Managing Director for South and South East Asia, Philippe Huinck explains how the leading international healthcare and security services company ensures their clients, who range from multinational corporations to non-governmental organisations, realise their broad-reaching duty of care obligations towards their most valued assets-their employees.

“Organisations that promote international assignments and business travel have a liability, whether moral or legal, to protect their staff. The concept of duty of care presumes employers take the necessary steps to ensure their employees, and the family of their employees, are guarded from harm, especially when they are overseas,” says Huinck.