Felix Restaurant on the top floor of The Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong's most famous hotel, at 22 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, is holding a Western-style business dinner at the moment. The reception was hosted by Jiahua Bank to celebrate the successful acquisition of Cathay Bank, the largest Chinese bank in the United States.

Although K. Wah Bank has been established less than a decade ago, it has now surpassed HSBC to become the largest bank in Hong Kong, backed by the powerful Oriental Group. According to the data of the 1990 fiscal year annual report released by Jiahua Group, the total deposits of Jiahua Bank reached 610 billion Hong Kong dollars.

Although this scale is only a little more than half of HSBC's total deposits of HK$1.1 trillion, if we only compare the total deposits in Hong Kong, Jiahua accounts for 30.56% of the total deposits in Hong Kong with HK$550 billion, surpassing HSBC, which is only 540 billion, and becomes the bank that absorbs the most deposits in Hong Kong.

With the gradual expansion of the scale of Jiahua Bank, especially after its merger with Standard Chartered Hong Kong, the expansion of the Hong Kong local market has basically reached the extreme, and it has begun to seek to go out of Hong Kong. The first step of Jiahua's external expansion is to choose Southeast Asia, which has close exchanges with Hong Kong and has a large amount of Chinese capital.

You must know that the reputation of "God of Wealth Li" is thunderous in the Chinese circle in Southeast Asia. Moreover, with the rise of the Oriental Group, many Southeast Asian Chinese businessmen have also followed the trend to invest in the electronics industry, and many of them are supporting enterprises in the Oriental industrial chain. Through the cooperation with local Chinese, Jiahua Bank has successfully gained a firm foothold in the Southeast Asian market.

After that, Jiahua set its sights on the broader European and American markets, especially the United States, where Wall Street is known as the center of global capital. Only by gaining a foothold here can it be regarded as occupying a place in the global financial market. The first step of Jiahua Bank's entry into the U.S. market also chose the Chinese community with the same culture.

Founded in 1962, Cathay Bank was one of the first Chinese-owned banks in the United States to serve the Chinese American community. After nearly two decades of development, its total assets have reached $1 billion. Jiahua Bank wholly acquired Cathay Bank with $70 million worth of Jiahua shares in the form of a share exchange merger.

Some people may ask, isn't it a profit to buy $1 billion in assets for just $70 million?

Total assets are not net assets, especially for the banking industry, where the majority of its assets come from customer deposits. For example, the total assets of Jiahua Bank are as high as $85.5 billion when converted into US dollars, but after deducting deposits, there are only about $7.3 billion. And if you want to calculate net assets, it is much lower than that.

With the acquisition of Cathay Bank, Jiahua Bank has only increased its business by just over 1%. So this can only be regarded as a small acquisition, but it is a very commemorative moment for Jiahua Bank's global layout, because it has finally gone out of Asia and began to enter the world!

It was precisely because of the extraordinary significance that Li Xuan also specially prepared to attend this reception, but he arrived a little later than the opening time of the banquet. It's not that he has a traffic jam on the road, but the richest man travels in a way that the poor can imagine.

From the back garden of their mansion at the Victoria Peak, they flew by helicopter directly to the helipad on the roof of The Peninsula Hotel. It's just that before he got on the helicopter, a few bear children in the family didn't have time to do their homework because of the noise, and they were reprimanded by their strict mother to cry. Li Xuan, a twenty-four filial piety father, naturally wants to stand up and pretend to be white-faced, and solve the internal conflicts in the family first!

So by the time Li Xuan arrived at Felix Restaurant, the opening speech of the reception had already ended. The guests who participated in the dinner gathered in twos and threes, elegantly holding goblets and sipping mellow champagne, enjoying the beautiful night view of Victoria Harbour outside the glass curtain wall, chatting about various topics, and the atmosphere was relaxed and warm but not noisy.

However, as soon as Li Xuan entered the door, he immediately became the focus of the entire banquet hall, and many people even had a scorching light in their eyes. Fortunately, all the people present were people with status, and everyone observed social etiquette, and they did not swarm around.

The first to greet was the host of this banquet, Yang Lingjun, chairman of the board of directors of Jiahua Group. Half a step behind him, several other people followed, all of whom were the most heavyweight VIPs of the banquet, such as Mr. Robert Rubin, a member of the Goldman Sachs Group.

"I'm very sorry, I'm sorry for being late for something, I apologize to everyone!" Li Xuan casually took a glass of champagne from the waiter, and then raised his glass to apologize to everyone.

"Mr. Li Xuan, it is a great pleasure to meet you again in Hong Kong!" Robert Rubin also raised his glass and greeted him.

Jiahua's acquisition of Cathay Bank was planned by Goldman Sachs Group. However, with such a small case amounting to less than $100 million, it is naturally impossible for the chairman of Goldman Sachs to fly to Hong Kong to attend the celebration reception.

This time, they were originally going to Asia to inspect business, and they passed through Hong Kong to coincide with their meeting. And the reason why Li Xuan came to Jiahua's cocktail party was largely to receive Robert Rubin. The chairman of Goldman Sachs took the initiative to come all the way to show his face, and Li Xuan naturally accepted the other party's affection.

In another time and space, he happened to see a French documentary called "Goldman Sachs Rules". Since the nineties, Goldman Sachs has never been absent from any US administration. So much so that there is a joke on Wall Street: the United States controls the world, and Goldman Sachs controls the United States!

According to the information Li Xuan has seen before, this Robert Rubinke is a hardcore Democratic supporter. Therefore, once Clinton really defeats Bush Sr. and becomes the new president of the United States, as he did in another time and space, the current Mr. Rubin is likely to take up an important position in the new Democratic administration!

Li Xuan walked around the banquet hall, and after chatting with the guests who came to the celebration banquet for a while, he invited Rubin into a small box next to him for a more private exchange.

"First of all, congratulations to CG on breaking through the $30 billion mark in total market capitalization, in the words of you Chinese, it's called 'Wishing you prosperity'!" Rubin finally said the words "Wishing you prosperity" in Cantonese, and at the same time, he also deliberately held his hands into fists, obviously because he had specifically understood this custom of the Chinese people before.

"Haha, thank you for your blessings, Goldman Sachs and I are also old friends, when CG was listed before, it was still the stock that you Goldman Sachs helped underwrite, and everyone made a fortune together!" Li Xuan said with a smile.

Since its establishment, the Oriental Group has cooperated with Goldman Sachs no less than 10 times, and most of them are large projects of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. Goldman Sachs has made a lot of money from the Oriental Group, so even this celebration banquet of a $70 million small merger and acquisition case of Jiahua Bank, Rubin also specially attended on behalf of Goldman Sachs.

"Although the general trend of U.S. stocks has been falling in recent years, consumer and high-tech have risen sharply against the trend! I don't know if you have considered taking advantage of the current wave of market to let Oriental Game Company and Oriental Research Institute go public in the United States?"

Every time the senior management of Goldman Sachs Group met with Li Xuan, they inevitably lobbied him to take the two most promising subsidiaries of the Oriental Group to be listed in the United States, and Rubin was no exception this time.

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