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well. The poor performance of foreign bank subsidiaries was a result of the foreign banks acquiring poorly performing US banks and being unable to improve their performance sufficiently within the period that the authors examined. (One cannot arrive at strong conclusions from studies of the profitability of subsidiaries. Banks transfer profits across borders (Demirgü?-Kunt and Huizinga, 2001), and foreign banks may prefer to book some business from their headquarters (Peek and Rosengren, 2000).) Still, HSBC's operations in the US and Canada are survivors of a winnowing process that saw other banks from Canada, Japan, the UK and the US sell their Canadian or US subsidiaries, in some cases to HSBC. As Mitchell and Shaver (2003) show with respect to firms in the US medical sector, firms differ in their ability to absorb and manage business on a continuing basis. They use the biological metaphor of predation and their evidence is consistent with the idea that some predators are better able to target desirable prey and better able to overpower the prey they target. HSBC appears to have found that it is one such successful predator. One may surmise that HSBC initially chose to acquire weak banks as much out of necessity as design. For any given size, a profitable bank will cost more than an unprofitable one, and to achieve its goal of diversifying, HSBC needed to acquire large banks. Now that HSBC is one of the world's largest banks, whether one measures by market capitalization or total assets, it has more leeway.

Conclusion

Assuming that there is a positive relationship between marketing spend and market share, marketing activities, if well-targetted should have a incremental impact on market share. However, this does not always seem to hold true within the “big four” banks.. Barclays and HSBC both developed their market share by 1% between 1995 and 2000, in spite of greatly varied levels of investment in marketing. Lloyds TSB market share fell by 2% although the bank spent significantly more than either Barclays or HSBC while NatWest and RBS have both declined by 4% despite having a collective expenditure of more than double Barclays. This perhaps, at least partly, explains why HSBC has adopted a highly acquisitive strategy, realising that, although the core brand is strong, customer recognition may have saturated, therefore integrating both fresh brands into subsidiaries in tandem with launching new, retail-focussed services, keeps the proposition fresh.

Recommendations

With the disproportionate focus on retail banking, HSBC has yet not come over as a major player in investment banking. However, with the wave of recent milestone deals during over the last three years, the bank is beginning to emerged as an investment banking brand. HSBC played a central role in two of Europe's biggest-ever merger and acquisition deals i.e. Mittal Steel's hostile bid for France's Arcelor and German utility company E.On's offering for Spanish rival Endesa. However, the development in the direction of investment banking requires some acceleration as the retail ban king sector continues to be heavily impacted by the sub-prime mortgage fallout and credit tightness. The bank has been planning to further enhance its business in the UK by investing ￡400m in retail and commercial distribution network and setting up 500 new ATMs, 250 new Express terminals, however this is has not yet materialised and may b