The British group has announced its withdrawal from seven countries in Africa and the Middle East. The bank intends to carry out its activities in Côte d’Ivoire, in Tanzania where it intends to carry out its corporate, commercial and institutional Banking (CCIB) activities. Present in 53 countries across the continent, the group prefers to focus on its most profitable markets.
The British firm announced in a press release its withdrawal from seven African and Middle Eastern markets. For African countries, these are Cameroon, Angola, Gambia, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe.
To explain its withdrawal, the group does this by the fact “we are focusing more on the opportunities on the most important growth opportunities while simplifying our activities and we remain disciplined in our evaluation of the areas in which we can offer greater remuneration. to our shareholders,” CEO Bill Winters explained in a note.
In 2021, Standard Chartered achieved a turnover of 2.4 billion dollars (+3%) in the Africa-Middle East (AMO) zone. Despite these figures, the bank is struggling to position itself as a leader in Cameroon. According to data from the Central Bank of Cameroon, for the month of January 2022, for example, the banking institution posts only 83.9 billion FCFA of credits to the economy, which represents only 1.94% of shares of the market. In this respect, the bank has lower figures compared to Afriland First Bank, the market leader with 20.83% market share, but much better than the American Citi Bank (1.63%), the bank now majority public capital UBC (0.67%), and the public bank BC-PME (0.58%).