At DBS’s Investor Day on May 22, Gupta said: “When I first joined the company, I asked: What could create a differentiated investor proposition?”
The outperformance of DBS Group Holdings since group CEO Piyush Gupta took over in 2009 is not due to chance.
When Gupta first joined DBS, he had something of an uphill task. He had inherited a bank that had seen five different CEOs in 10 years and one which had — in the view of most investors — overpaid for Dao Heng Bank in Hong Kong in 2001. Some market watchers reckon that the $10 billion price tag is one of the reasons DBS has not made any transformational acquisitions — similar to Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp’s acquisition of Wing Hang Bank in Hong Kong — since then.
