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| Home > Topics > East Asia > Deutsche Bank in East Asia |
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Setting up branches as fast as possible in East Asia - this was one of the objectives that Deutsche Bank had concentrated on starting with its foundation in 1870. Hermann Wallich, who had worked in Japan, India and China for a Parisian bank, joined the Deutsche Bank's Board of Managing Directors in 1870 as a renowned specialist for business in Asia. At this time, the markets in Asia, with their two large export articles - tea and silk - were considered to be extremely promising. For this reason, already in May 1872, Deutsche Bank opened its first foreign branches in Shanghai and Yokohama, the most important foreign trading centers in China and Japan. These were branches No. 3 and 4, after Deutsche Bank had first set up branches in Bremen and Hamburg.
Initially, however, the expectations placed in the East Asian business were not fulfilled. The German Reich, which began switching over from the silver to the gold standard in 1871, had commissioned Deutsche Bank with the sale of its large silver reserves, and Hermann Wallich saw East Asia as a suitable sales market. Although Deutsche Bank earned healthy profits from the sale of silver during the years 1873-1876, the price of silver sank dramatically as a result. This was damaging to the branches in Shanghai and Yokohama, whose operating capital was based on silver. After two financial years full of losses, the Board of Managing Directors in Berlin therefore decided to close the branches in 1875. Business with East Asia was conducted from then on through the bank's London branch, established in 1873.
Fourteen years were to go by before Deutsche Bank again returned to East Asia: within the framework of its participation in Deutsch-Asiatische Bank, which was founded with headquarters in Shanghai in 1889 by a syndicate of renowned stock corporation banks and private bankers. Deutsch-Asiatische Bank set up branches in China, Japan and India, and it received the concession to issue its own banknotes in China in 1906. The bank's principal activity was trade financing; but together with English and French banks, it also played an outstanding role in the underwriting of bonds for the Chinese government and in the financing of railway construction in China.
The First and Second World Wars destroyed Deutsch-Asiatische Bank's branch network and business activities, and 1953 was the year it launched a new beginning in Hamburg. Together with partner banks within the EBIC group, Deutsche Bank subsequently founded "Europäisch-Asiatische Bank" in 1972 (later renamed "European Asian Bank"), which the former Deutsch-Asiatische Bank was merged into. One after the other, the partner banks withdrew from their participations, and starting from the end of 1986 the bank was called "Deutsche Bank (Asia)", which was then merged into Deutsche Bank in 1987-88 with the 14 branches it had at that time.
Deutsche Bank returned to Shanghai in 1995, first with a
representative
office and, since 1999, with one of its own branches. In
Japan, business
activities were launched as early as 1962 with the
opening of a
representative office in Tokyo, and the branch that
Deutsche Ueberseeische
Bank had there was taken over in 1976 as one Deutsche
Bank's own branches.
On November 2, 2004, Deutsche Bank opened a branch in
Beijing (it had already
maintained a representative office in the capital city
Beijing since 1981).
In 2007, Deutsche Bank Group employed 16,000 staff
members in the
Asia/Pacific region through a network of over 45
subsidiaries, branches and
representative offices in 17 markets.
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