Happy birthday
THE most profitable British merchant bank? Correct: S.G. Warburg. And the next most? Some grand old name like Hambros, Rothschilds, Schroders, Bar- ings? No. Kleinwort Benson, Hill Samuel? — good heavens, no, they lost more than £100 million between them. Clue: this year it is 21 years old. This is Jardine Fleming, the joint venture based in Hong Kong and enterprisingly run, first by Nicholas Sibley, and now by Alan Smith. It is now outdoing its parent and 50 per cent shareholder, Robert Fleming. In one way it outper- formed the leader last year, for its profits, unlike Warburgs', went up. That was good going when its most important stock mar- ket, Tokyo, took its biggest fall since the war. It shows what can still be done, from scratch, when Western financial skills are let loose in economies with Eastern growth rates. Happy birthday.
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