Asia’s finance houses lead jobs recovery

HONG KONG—Financial institutions are leading a recovery in the Asian jobs market as the region emerges from recession more forcefully than expected, analysts say.

While overall unemployment is still rising a year after the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers, economists say it is the finance sector which is bucking the trend.

“I’d be as bullish as to say we are in a recovery,” said Mike Game, the CEO of Hong Kong-based recruitment firm Hudson’s Asia operation.

“We have seen quite a marked turnaround in activity in China in particular. We are also seeing strength in Singapore.”

Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection on September 15, 2008, as it buckled under the weight of the collapse in US sub-prime mortgages, in a scandal that became emblematic of the worldwide financial crisis.

“What happened during the downturn was that a lot of firms couldn’t be seen to not lay people off but a lot were reluctant to let people go,” said Matthew Hoyle, founder of Matthew Hoyle Financial Markets, a specialist headhunter for the banking and hedge fund industries, based in Hong Kong.

“Now those birds are coming home to roost and there has been a complete reversal in the hiring market. We are now seeing people who were laid off coming back and demanding signing-on fees.”

Hoyle said business had tripled since the height of the downturn, adding: “It wasn’t entirely unexpected but I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams it would be this intense.”

Official government statistics in Hong Kong back up Hoyle’s optimism.

Although the latest available finance sector employment figures show a 0.6-percent drop in the first quarter of 2009 from the same period a year earlier, they are up on the last quarter of 2008 by 0.4 percent—equivalent to nearly 700 jobs.

Analysts say the financial institutions stopped hiring altogether in the final three months of last year, before beginning to replace key positions at the start of this year and then taking on staff to meet growing demand in the second quarter.

One trader of a blue chip financial institution in Hong Kong, who asked not to be named, told AFP he had managed to find work with a new firm after being made redundant in the downturn.

“Even though I’ve been in my new job for about three months, I had two headhunters call up out of the blue in the last two days with multiple roles for derivatives traders at bulge bracket US banks,” he said.

“And a number of other jobs on the go are typically smaller banks and brokerages, picking their moment to get into markets they had previously missed the bus on and lift some modestly priced experience to set up new operations.”

HSBC is recruiting more than 100 staff members in Hong Kong, The New York Times reported at the start of September, while in mainland China it plans to add 1,000 employees this year, and a similar number next year.

Most of the jobs that are coming back are replacements of previously cut positions, not new jobs, market experts say. But Ian Strutton, director of Manpower Professional Hong Kong, said 20 percent were new positions.

“Generally it is accepted that when a recession comes it is the financial services that are first to react and cut investment, and when the economy starts to recover they are the first to start reinvesting, and they do it quickly,” he said.

A recent survey of 815 Hong Kong employers published by recruitment agency Manpower showed that there were marginally more finance sector companies planning to increase staff in the fourth quarter than there were firms planning more downsizing.

“We see an emerging demand from corporate banking, showing a gradual improvement in job opportunities, especially wealth management,” said Lancy Chui, general manager of Manpower Hong Kong and Macau.

In China, one recruitment company said the outlook for the Chinese financial services sector was positive as the world’s third largest economy was recovering and investor confidence had improved.

Demand for people with finance industry experience had increased in the past two months, Thomas Zhou, partner at Dacare Consulting in Beijing, told AFP.

“Market sentiment in China has picked up since the stock market started to go up. There’s been a lot of (recruitment) activity,” Zhou said. –Frankie Taggart, Agence France-Presse