Category: 3. Business

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CHENNAI, India — Now that artificial intelligence has mastered almost everything we do online, it needs help learning how we physically move around in the real world.

A growing global army of trainers is helping it escape our computers and enter our living rooms, offices and factories by teaching it how we move.

In an industrial town in southern India, Naveen Kumar, 28, stands at his desk and starts his job for the day: folding hand towels hundreds of times, as precisely as possible.

He doesn’t work at a hotel; he works for a startup that creates physical data used to train AI.

He mounts a GoPro camera to his forehead and follows a regimented list of hand movements to capture exact point-of-view footage of how a human folds.

That day, he had to pick up each towel from a basket on the right side of his desk, using only his right hand, shake the towel straight using both hands, then fold it neatly three times. Then he had to put each folded towel in the left corner of the desk.

If it takes more than a minute or he misses any steps, he has to start over.

His firm, a data labeling company called Objectways, sent 200 towel-folding videos to its client in the United States. The company has more than 2,000 employees; about half of them label sensor data from autonomous cars and robotics, and the rest work on generative AI.

Most of them are engineers, and few are well-practiced in folding towels, so they take turns doing the physical labor.

“Sometimes we have to delete nearly 150 or 200 videos because of silly errors in how we’re folding or placing items,” said Kumar, an engineering graduate who has worked at Objectways for six years.

The carefully choreographed movements are to capture all the nuances of what humans do — arm reaching, fingers gripping, fabric sliding — to fold clothes.

The captured videos are then annotated by Kumar and his team. They draw boxes around the different parts of the video, tag the towels, and label whether the arm moved left or right, and classify each gesture.

Kumar and his colleagues in the town of Karur, which is about 300 miles south of Bengaluru, are an unlikely batch of tutors for the next generation of AI-powered robots.

“Companies are building foundation models fit for the physical world,” said Ulrik Stig Hansen, co-founder of Encord, a data management platform in San Francisco that contracts with Objectways to collect human demonstration data. “There’s this huge resurgence in robotics.”

Encord works with robotics companies such as Jeff Bezos-backed Physical Intelligence and Dyna Robotics.

Tesla, Boston Dynamics and Nvidia are among the leaders in the U.S. in the race to develop the next generation of robots. Tesla already uses its Optimus robots — which seem to be often remotely controlled — for different company events. Google has its own AI models for robotics. OpenAI is beefing up its robotics ambitions.

Nvidia projects the humanoid robot market could reach $38 billion over the next decade.

There are also many lesser-known companies trying to provide the hardware, software and data to make a mass-produced, multitasking humanoid robot a reality.

Large language models that power chatbots such as ChatGPT have mastered using language, images, music, coding and other skills by hoovering up everything online. They use the entire internet to figure out how things are connected and mimic how we do things, such as answering questions and creating photo-realistic videos.

Data on how the physical world works — how much force is required to fold a napkin, for example — is harder to get and translate into something AI can use.

As robotics improves and combines with AI that knows how to move in the physical world, it could bring more robots into the workplace and the home. While many fear this could lead to job losses and unemployment, optimists think advanced robots would free up humans from tedious work, lower labor costs and eventually give people more time to relax or focus on more interesting and important work.

Many companies have entered the fray as shovel sellers in the AI gold rush, seeing an opportunity to gather data for what is being called physical AI.

One group of companies is teaching AI how to act in the real world by having humans guide robots remotely.

Ali Ansari, founder of San Francisco-based Micro1, said emerging robotics data collection increasingly focuses on teleoperations. Humans with controllers make the robot do something like picking up a cup or making tea. The AI is fed videos of successful and failed attempts at doing something and learns to do it.

The remote-control training can happen in the same room as the robots or with the controller in a different country. Encord’s Hansen said that there are warehouses planned in Eastern Europe where large teams of operators will sit with joysticks, guiding robots across the world.

There are more of these, what some have dubbed “arm farms,” popping up as demand increases, said Mohammad Musa, founder of Deepen AI, a data annotation firm headquartered in California.

“Today, a mix of real and synthetic data is being used, gathered from human demonstrations, teleoperation sessions and staged environments,” he said. “Much of this work still occurs outside the West, but automation and simulation are reducing that dependency over time.”

Some have criticized teleoperated humanoids for being more sizzle than substance. They can be impressive when others are controlling them, but still far from fully autonomous.

Ansari’s Micro1 also does something called human data capture. It pays people to wear smart glasses that capture everyday actions. It is doing this in Brazil, Argentina, India, and the United States.

San José-based Figure AI, partnered with real estate giant Brookfield to capture footage from inside 100,000 homes. It will collect data about human movement to teach humanoid robots how to move in human spaces. The company said it will spend much of the $1 billion it raised to collect first-person human data.

Meta-backed Scale AI, has collected 100,000 hours of similar training footage for robotics through its prototype laboratory set up in San Francisco.

Still, training bots isn’t always easy.

Twenty-year-old Dev Mandal created a company in Bengaluru, hoping to cash in on the need for physical data to train AI. He offered India’s inexpensive labor to capture movements. After advertising his services, he got requests to help train a robotic arm to cook food as well as a robot to plug and unplug cables in data centers.

But he had to give up the business, as potential clients needed the physical movement data collected in a very specific manner, making it tougher for him to make money, even with India’s inexpensive labor. Clients wanted an exact robot arm, for example, using a certain kind of table with purple lights to be used.

“Everything, down to the color of the table, had to be specified by them,” he said. “And they said that this has to be the exact color.”

Still, there’s lots of work for the towel folders of Karur.

Their boss, Objectways founder Ravi Shankar, says that in recent months, his firm has captured and annotated footage of robotic arms folding cardboard boxes and T-shirts and picking out certain colored objects on a table.

It recently started annotating videos from more advanced humanoid robots, helping train them to sort and fold a mix of towels and clothes, folding them and placing them in different corners of the table. His team had to annotate 15,000 videos of the robots doing the jobs.

“Sometimes the robot’s arms throw the clothes and won’t fold properly. Sometimes it scatters the stack,” but the robots are learning quickly said Kavin, 27, an Objectways employee who goes by one name. “In five or 10 years, they’ll be able to do all the jobs and there will be none left for us.”

Bob Rich’s frozen food business was so successful that he bought the first naming rights to an NFL Stadium in 1973. With the Buffalo Bills’ home set to be demolished after this season, his son, Bob Jr. looks back on the cold realities of running a $5.8 billion family business.

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Whenever someone offers to acquire Rich Products—Buffalo, New York’s $5.8 billion (annual sales) food giant that you’ve probably never heard of—its senior chairman and son of the founder, Bob Rich Jr., has a form letter ready for his assistant to send back.

The response gets sent often, according to Rich: “We say, Dear blank, thank you for your interest in our company. Rich Products is not for sale. Yours Truly.”

His assistant often asks if he wants to know who she’s sending the letter back to, but he actually doesn’t. “I don’t really care,” the 84-year-old billionaire says, chuckling. “How bad is that?”

“Our biggest priority is that we want to remain a privately held company for eternity,” adds his wife, Mindy, 68, who is chairman of Rich’s and its board.

Rich’s north star is keeping the business under 100% family control, as he says, “to have the freedom to make decisions quickly and move ahead with more speed.” His father, Bob Sr., invented the first non-dairy whipped topping in 1945—three years before the better-known (and dairy-based) Reddi-Wip came to market—and Rich’s signature whipped topping is now sold in more than 100 countries. It remains one of the top products for an expansive food conglomerate—which Forbes values at north of $7 billion—whose range of products include cookies sold at supermarket bakeries, cold foam offered at coffee shops, pizza dough for independent and chain pizzerias, as well as SeaPak frozen seafood and Carvel ice cream cakes. Its longtime customers include Walmart, Kroger, and Dunkin’, Publix, Sodexo and more.

“Growth for us is not exponential. It’s not a straight line. It goes step by step,” says Rich, whose fortune Forbes estimates at $6.5 billion, based on his stake in the business and other investments.

The company expects to grow annual revenue to $10 billion by 2030, and the plan to get there includes more “breakthrough” products designed for restaurants and wholesalers that alleviate labor woes as well as reformulating some bestsellers for the MAHA era.

Dreams of Fields: In 1973, Bob Rich Sr. paid $1.5 million for the naming rights to the Buffalo Bills’ stadium, the first such deal in NFL history.

Jeff Goode/Toronto Star/Getty Images

And there’s another massive change ahead for Rich’s: At the end of this NFL season, the Buffalo Bills’ stadium—which became the first to sell naming rights to a business in 1973 when Bob Sr. spent $1.5 million for a 25-year contract, the only one to make a bid—will be demolished. It bore the Rich family name until 1997, when it was renamed for team founder Ralph Wilson until 2015.

“Now there are about 500 stadiums around the world that have sold their naming rights. It was a crazy decision,” Rich says, “that was okay.”

Bob and Mindy, avid Bills fans, say they are excited for the new stadium, just as they are excited about what’s on the horizon for Rich’s as it moves into its next 80 years. “I saw someone walking around last week wearing a shirt that said, ‘We still call it Rich Stadium,’ which I laughed about,” says Bob. “It’ll be a point of pride for everybody, including us.”

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The son of a Buffalo dairyman, Robert E. Rich delivered milk for his father during summers in high school and when he graduated in 1935 he started his own dairy business. It soon became one of the largest in the region. Then, during World War II, he served as a milk administrator while dairy was rationed and got inspired when a chance call from a hospital purchasing agent mentioned how they were using soybean-based milks and creams from Henry Ford’s George Washington Carver Laboratory. After a tour of the facility, Rich was granted rights to their manufacturing system for a symbolic $1 fee. And he set out to develop a dessert topping—less fattening and harder to spoil, and, above all, cheaper to make than whipped cream—to the masses.

His frozen blue cans of Rich’s non-dairy whipped topping were a hit—he had $29,900 in sales that first year in 1945 (or about $540,000 today)—and as World War II rations came to an end and post-war grocery spending boomed, so did sales. By 1952, sales topped $1 million (or $12 million today) for the first time. And the business prevailed even after attracting 40 different lawsuits from the dairy industry claiming he was counterfeiting cream. Rich didn’t let any of that stop him, and he quickly brought the treat around the world.

“My father used to joke that his office was the tray of an airplane,” says Bob Jr., who joined the business full-time in 1963 after summers and afterschool hours spent on the family loading docks. Bob Jr. had to be wooed by his father. His interests had been elsewhere, after playing hockey as the backup goalie for Buffalo’s American Hockey League franchise, a failed 1964 Olympics hockey tryout and interviews with the Air Force and the CIA. But Bob Sr. offered his son the chance to build a plant in Canada and oversee a $1 million budget (about $10 million today) as president of the company’s first international division.

Just Desserts: Invented in 1945, Rich’s Whip Topping was less fattening and cheaper to make than whipped cream

Rich Products

The father and son had a competitive relationship at first. But they soon realized they were teammates after the first 5,000 pounds of topping from Bob Jr.’s new Canadian factory wouldn’t whip, and Bob Jr. had to swallow his pride and ask his dad for help.

Rich’s first major acquisition came in 1976, the year that company annual sales topped $100 million for the first time. The business purchased SeaPak frozen seafood for $11.5 million—and it cemented the business’s strategy of useing acquisitions to grow. Bob Jr. became president of Rich’s two years later, and has added 60 brands through acquisitions since. He also bought Buffalo’s struggling Triple A baseball team to make sure the franchise stayed in the city and has owned the Buffalo Bisons, the minor league franchise of the Toronto Blue Jays, since 1983.

Later that year, Bob Jr. met Mindy, 16 years younger, at a Buffalo Bisons baseball game. It turned out that she also grew up in a family-owned food business—one based in Cincinnati— that sold donuts and other products like extruded crunchy onion rings.

The two wed—it was Bob Jr.’s third marriage—and Mindy started working at Rich’s “the day we got back from our honeymoon” in 1985—in the company’s internal entertainment department. (And it wasn’t until years later that she realized that, after her family sold its business amid problems, some of the brands changed hands a few times, and the onion ring brand even ended up being owned by Rich’s.) “Having grown up in the food industry, it didn’t make sense when we got married for me to work anywhere else,” says Mindy. By 1996, annual sales topped $1 billion.

Bob Jr. took over as chairman in 2006, after his father passed away at 92. Bob Sr. had spent 61 years at the helm of the company, and until his death he always had a dog-eared piece of paper in his pocket with the company’s annual sales. Rich’s had made a profit every year it was in business at the time (and that’s still true today). Forbes estimated annual sales in the final year of his life at $2.4 billion.

Bob Jr. inherited a fortune worth at least $1.5 billion. His younger brother, David, who became a priest and had moved to Jackson, Mississippi to work for an Anglican Church, inherited the rest of the family stake, worth hundreds of millions. Their sister, Joanna, whose husband sued his father-in-law twice and lost both times, was cut out of the will.

As Rich’s became a $3 billion (annual sales) company in 2013, the business went on a new acquisition spree, adding patented smoothie machine brand F’Real Foods as well as three wholesale bakery businesses.

With that kind of growth, the Riches had to make a concerted effort to stop talking about work at home, and even vowed that they would never speak of work while spending time on their fishing boat. “I’d say we were successful 80% of the time,” Mindy recalls. Rich has written several novels about fishing, and 2015’s Looking Through Water about an estranged father and son at a fly fishing tournament was turned into a movie with Michael Douglas that was released in September.

Buffalo Billing: Until his death at 92, Bob Rich Sr. always had a paper in his pocket with the company’s annual sales. In 2006, the final year of his life, it was $2.4 billion.

Rich Products

In 2021, when annual sales were $4 billion, Rich decided to replace himself as chairman of the board, which he had run for the past 15 years, and determined Mindy was the perfect person to replace him. “It’s given me the opportunity to step into a new role as a senior chairman and brought new joy watching Mindy bring her personality to the forefront,” Rich says.

“Our approach to being transparent and authentic during the challenging times has helped us build trust,” she adds. “You can’t always paint a rosy picture when the picture is maybe not as rosy as you’d like it to be.”

One thing the Riches agree on is Bob Sr.’s guiding principle—remaining private: “We realized that publicly held companies couldn’t have the stability that we could in a well-run privately held company that has continuity of leadership and direction.”

That unwavering commitment to being family-owned doesn’t mean that the family needs to have Rich’s be family-run in the future. For years, they had a rule in place that any of his four children who want to work at Rich’s must first get a job and a promotion at another company.

The heir apparent would be Ted Rich, 56, Bob’s second-eldest son who started at Rich’s in sales in 1995 at 26 years old, and is now the chief growth officer. But Ted, who is also on Rich’s board and leads the family council, demurs when asked if he’s next in line: “Every day I wake up and just think about the importance of stewardship,” he says. “I’m just happy to be a part of it and offer my leadership where I can, candidly. I will continue to support and offer my leadership in any way possible.”

“I you’re not moving forward, it’s not going to work,” adds Ted. “You can’t stand still in business.”

Rich’s CEO Richard Ferranti, 65, describes Bob and Mindy’s leadership style as “simple but powerful.” Referencing one of their core beliefs that “you can’t do good business with bad people,” he shares a moment that drove this ideal home to him a few years ago. Ferranti had been pursuing a large acquisition that would have reshaped Rich’s portfolio and significantly expanded its customer base. “On paper, it was a game-changer,” he says.

But late in the due-diligence process, they uncovered two serious issues. As Ferranti recalls, “While this company’s explanations and mitigation plans met legal and regulatory requirements, what stood out was their lack of genuine care and concern for the impact on customers and reputation. That gave us a window into the management team’s values, and since we planned to retain most of them, it was a deal-breaker. Walking away from something that big was difficult and easy at the same time.”

Another important aspect of what Rich’s doesn’t compromise on is its location. Rich says the business is often asked to move its headquarters to “wonderful warm climate cities” often with tax incentives or other funding offered. But he doesn’t think twice.

“We are a Buffalo company,” he says. “We’re going to fight for our community. And, as everybody says—last one to leave, turn out the lights. If that happens, it’ll probably be us.”

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Travelers booking hotel reservations online may soon notice that the process increasingly mirrors what it’s like to buy airline tickets.

Want early check-in or late check-out? More space, a higher floor or a garden view? Pool access or a “hydration station” (aka bottled water) in your room?

Check “yes” before you book and the cost will be added to your basic room rate.

How about milk and cookies for the kids or a gourmet snack box for your dog? Those bonus amenities can be waiting for you in your room, for an added, prepaid fee.

Artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies are turning hotel operators into travel retailers, selling much more than just rooms.

Individual properties can now creatively unbundle and repackage their room inventories, allowing guests to personalize their stays and increasing revenue.

But it can be tricky for a hotel to find the sweet spot between giving guests more control over the details of their stays and leaving them feeling like a hotel is charging for perks that guests expect for free.

Boutique perks

At the 14-room Lakehouse Inn in Lee, Massachusetts, a new AI-powered booking platform helps match guests with specific rooms and maximizes returns on each booking.

“Each of our rooms is unique, and previously guests could only book a room type, i.e., king or queen, and then call us if they wanted a specific room,” said co-owner Kurt Inderbitzin.

The Lakehouse Inn’s new booking platform asks prospective guests their preferred room size, bedding, location and view. Then it provides detailed photos and descriptions of a few specific rooms that meet the requests.

The question, then, becomes whether a guest is willing to pay more for a room that’s a little bit more to their liking.

Only 14% of U.S. hotel guests were willing to pay a premium for a room with a better view, and only 11% for a room on a higher floor, according to surveys conducted earlier this year by Atmosphere Research Group, a travel industry market research firm.

“I’m a budget traveler and never spend extra” on perks, said Debbie Twombly, 74, a substitute teacher in Astoria, Oregon.

While some guests may feel nickel-and-dimed if they are asked to pony up for once-standard amenities like bottled water or pool access, others will pay for amenities they view as contributing to the enjoyment of their stay.

Los Angeles-based leadership brand strategist Anne Taylor Hartzell, 50, is fine with paying extra for a better view. “I’ve also paid for a bottle of bubbles to be chilled and waiting in my room,” she said.

At the 79-room Inn at the Market, a boutique hotel tucked in Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market, hotel guests can prepay to have a bouquet of market flowers or a box of fresh macaron cookies from a bakery around the corner waiting in their rooms.

And even though only around 5%-10% of guests opt for one of these a la carte perks, the additional income is “a positive outcome” that helps the property stand out from the city’s other downtown properties, said Jay Baty, the inn’s marketing and sales director.

Columbia Hospitality, which manages about 50 unique properties across the country, has also added optional upgrades into its booking path.

Its 73-room Wren hotel in Missoula, Montana, offers flower bouquets and an in-room pour-over coffee station as pre-bookable perks.

In Walla Walla, Washington, its hip, 80-room Finch offers a s’mores kit and half-pound boxes of chocolates.

AI-powered amenities

It’s not just boutique inns that are taking advantage of new ways to create custom stays.

In 2024, more than 5,000 Wyndham hotels adopted new technology that allows properties to text guests 24 hours before check-in with locally tuned add-on offers.

These include early check-in at a Howard Johnson hotel near Disneyland, and a basket of sunscreen and beach toys at a Days Inn in Jekyll Island, Georgia.

“The most successful hotels are those offering add-ons that truly enhance the experience at a price that makes sense for both sides,” said Scott Strickland, Wyndham’s chief commercial officer.

Other large chains are also using new technology to expand optional attributes, amenities and add-on services offered during booking.

Among them are IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International and Hilton Hotels, according to a closely watched global business travel forecast for next year.

A slippery slope

At a time when U.S. hotels are facing big challenges from owner rentals like Airbnb and VRBO, it can be tempting for properties to lean on new technology to offer ever more add-ons.

But this only works if hotels are prepared to deliver on all the products and experiences that technology permits them to offer to guests upfront.

“Letting guests reserve a fruit and cheese plate or rose petals on the bed upon arrival is great,” said Henry Harteveldt, president of Atmosphere Research Group.

“But it means a hotel has to make sure the cheese doesn’t look like it’s from the castaway bin at Safeway and that there are always fresh rose petals on hand and a staff member on duty who can artfully arrange them.”

Harteveldt said this means hotel owners need to ask themselves a new question: “Just because we can do this, should we?”

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The term refers to a 2017 incident in which the preppy clothing chain, under pressure from its creditors, utilized a “trap door” maneuver in which $250 million of its trademarks, including the name “J.Crew,” were moved to an entity in the Cayman Islands and then leased back to the company. That placed the assets out of reach of J.Crew’s creditors in the event of a bankruptcy. The new entity was able to raise a further $300 million in new debt—much to the dismay of the older creditors who wanted the opposite to happen.

JPMorgan and Coherent were both contacted for comment.

The J.Crew blocker in the JPMorgan-Coherent deal was interesting because in Q3 2025, 45% of private credit deals contained a J.Crew blocker, up from 26% the year before, and up from just 15% at the start of 2023, according to data from Noetica, a firm that advises on and analyzes private credit deals. Noetica’s database, which uses AI to sift contract language, covers more than $1 trillion in transactions and the company advises “nearly all” of the top 20 corporate law firms in the U.S. 

That’s not all. Lenders to corporate America—often big banks generating broadly syndicated loans that are sold on public markets—are getting stricter with their borrowers on a range of legal issues inside private credit deals, Noetica’s data indicates. While default rates and covenant breaches are not currently at unusual levels, the fact that banks are behaving as if they need to prepare for future negative consequences is significant, according to Noetica CEO Dan Wertman. 

“What the data supports is that lenders are quietly preparing for some distress on the horizon, and we see that in the data with the increasing structural protections existing in new credit deals,” he told Fortune. 

“Personally, I would interpret that as lenders are anxious about the future of these credit markets, and that’s being reflected in the terms.”

Among those terms is the rise of “anti-Petsmart” language. This refers to a controversy in 2018 when Petsmart, having acquired the online pet store Chewy for $3 billion, transferred a chunk of that stake to an “unrestricted” subsidiary of the company that was not subject to the guarantees required by Petsmart’s lenders. The move put the Chewy stake out of reach of the company’s creditors, making their lawyers very angry.

Back in 2023, only 4% of private credit deals tracked by Noetica contained anti-Petsmart language. In Q3 2025, 28% of contracts have it.

Similarly, a form of protection against a company taking on new debt or moving older creditors to the back of the line without the unanimous consent of existing creditors now occurs in 84% of deals, according to Noetica. The level of this so-called lien subordination protection was just 42% last year.

Leverage ratios are in decline, too. Leverage ratios are the amount of money lenders are willing to give companies in relation to their profits as defined by earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA).

It’s not all doom and gloom. Wertman says lenders have become more flexible in the way they let borrowers spend money. Over the same time periods, Noetica’s database of thousands of private credit contracts indicates that borrowers got more leeway to make investments, pay dividends, and more generous terms in how they calculate their EBITDA.

Wertman is careful to say he does not know why private credit deal terms are getting stricter, just that they are.

“Terms never move by accident,” he says. “These are sophisticated parties with highly sophisticated data sets and thought processes behind these deals. So I wouldn’t think about it as an accident. I would think about it as this is reflecting what lenders and borrowers are currently thinking of the market.”

There have been small cracks in the credit market recently, sources have told Fortune. We previously reported that covenant defaults—technical breaches of loan terms rather than payment failures—rose from 2.2% in 2024 to 3.5% currently, according to proprietary data from Lincoln International shared with Fortune. And payment-in-kind (PIK) deals, where struggling companies defer interest payments, went from 6.5% of deals in Q4 2021 to 11% today.

Similarly, Kroll Bond Rating Agency told Fortune that it estimates defaults will peak at 5%, based on its analysis of 2,400 companies carrying $1 trillion in private debt.

Switzerland’s MKS PAMP, one of the world’s largest refiners and traders of precious metals, has joined a growing number of European companies that are expanding operations in Hong Kong, drawn by the city’s strengthened focus on its financial services and commodity trading sectors.

The Geneva-based firm – locally known for minting the centenary gold bars for Bank of China (Hong Kong) in 2017 – on Thursday opened its 3,600 sq ft regional headquarters at the St John’s Building on Garden Road in Admiralty, a move that is expected to bolster the city’s role as an international gold trading hub.

“We decided to create a regional head office in Hong Kong because our clients wanted us to be making decisions in their time zone,” CEO James Emmett told the Post in an interview. “They wanted us to show the ability to move quickly here.”

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

“We see long-term demand for precious metals being very strong in Asia. Structurally, it continues to increase,” he added.

The Swiss firm’s customers include banks, governments, watch and jewellery manufacturers, retailers and other precious metal refiners.

The Hong Kong headquarters will serve as the company’s regional hub, overseeing a comprehensive suite of precious metals trading and financial services. Other core functions include regional sales and client relationship management, treasury operations and overall operational support for the Asia-Pacific region.

An image of the Bank of China Tower, designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei, is shown engraved on one of the commemorative gold bars minted by Swiss firm MKS PAMP for the 100th anniversary of the Bank of China (Hong Kong) in 2017. Photo: SCMP alt=An image of the Bank of China Tower, designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei, is shown engraved on one of the commemorative gold bars minted by Swiss firm MKS PAMP for the 100th anniversary of the Bank of China (Hong Kong) in 2017. Photo: SCMP>

Previously, MKS PAMP served its Asian clients from its Geneva headquarters. The opening hours of Asian markets are ahead of trading sessions in Europe.

The Swiss company’s expansion, along with similar initiatives by other European firms, reflected confidence in the city’s economic growth after a few turbulent years, which included the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2022, the total number of foreign companies operating in Hong Kong fell below 9,000 for the first time since 2019, according to government data. A 2022 survey by the European Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong found that nearly half of its 260 member companies considered either a full or partial relocation of offices relocating their offices within a 12-month period.

MKS PAMP sees Hong Kong as a gold trading centre, according to CEO Emmett. “Making Hong Kong an international gold trading hub was a deciding factor” to setting up an office in the city, he said.

“Hong Kong is not only a vital link to the Chinese mainland’s gold market, but also its position at the nexus of Asia-Pacific’s precious metals market,” he said. “We see great opportunities with the Chinese mainland as well as the rest of the Asia-Pacific.”

Its expansion in Hong Kong comes as other European firms have set up offices in the city. Paris-based private equity firm Ardian recently opened a new 4,000 sq ft office at Two International Finance Centre in Central – the firm’s fifth location in Asia – as it looks to expand its US$3 billion in regional investments within its US$200 billion in assets under management.

Meanwhile, London-headquartered fintech company 3S Money said it plans to launch its new office in the city in January.

St John’s Building on Garden Road in Admiralty, where MKS PAMP set up its Hong Kong headquarters. Photo: Google alt=St John’s Building on Garden Road in Admiralty, where MKS PAMP set up its Hong Kong headquarters. Photo: Google>

On Hong Kong’s advantages, MKS PAMP’s Emmett said the city provided not only trading and skilled talent, but also logistics, security and storage infrastructure – “all of which are very important for precious metals”.

In addition, he said: “Clear commercial law further strengthens Hong Kong’s ecosystem.”

MKS PAMP was also exploring the possibility of developing manufacturing or refining capabilities in the Greater Bay Area, which would complement its existing refinery in Switzerland.

That consideration comes as gold prices hit record highs this year, fuelled by historically strong central bank purchases, investor inflows and a weaker US dollar.

“Asian people are buying more physical gold and want to hold it,” Emmett said.

According to its website, MKS PAMP served as a reference price member for the Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price Trading – a centralised pricing process for the precious metal.

The momentum in gold is expected to continue, driven by “solid” demand from central banks, according to Alexandra Symeonidi, corporate credit analyst on William Blair’s emerging markets debt team. She added, however, that investor appetite remained uncertain amid ongoing market volatility.

This year, Hong Kong’s push to become a global gold trading hub has gathered pace in spite of ongoing geopolitical tensions.

In 2022, MKS PAMP became the first in its industry to launch a portfolio of precious metal products which have had their carbon footprint independently verified. Photo: Handout alt=In 2022, MKS PAMP became the first in its industry to launch a portfolio of precious metal products which have had their carbon footprint independently verified. Photo: Handout>

In June, the Shanghai Gold Exchange opened its first offshore physical gold delivery vault in the city, and the government has committed to building gold storage capacity exceeding 2,000 tonnes within three years, up from around 150 tonnes in late 2024.

Hong Kong is also planning to boost gold refining and set up a central clearing system, according to Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu’s policy address in September

For private equity firm Ardian, being close to clients in Hong Kong was a major reason for setting up a new office in the city, according to Jason Yao, the company’s head of Greater China. He said the firm sees Hong Kong as a natural base to further grow its secondary private equity business in Asia.

Ardian has about 50 long-standing clients in the Greater China region. Several major insurance companies had already committed to the firm’s various products, Yao said.

Meanwhile, 3S Money is building a seven-member team in Hong Kong – across sales, know-your-customer capabilities and anti-money-laundering functions – to provide personalised financial services. Founded in 2018, the firm operates six global offices worldwide, including in London, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Riga and Dubai.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

An increasing number of wealthy customers from mainland China are using Hong Kong to diversify their investments and expand their businesses globally, according to a senior executive of Hong Kong-based mid-tier lender China Citic Bank International.

“After many government efforts to promote family offices in recent years, we have seen strong growth from wealthy mainland customers seeking our bankers to help them set up family offices in Hong Kong,” said Wendy Yuen Miu-ling, head of the bank’s personal and business banking group, in an exclusive interview.

She said the bank, which uses the name CNCBI for short, had seen new cross-border wealth-management customers from the mainland triple in the first half of this year, while assets under management jumped 30 per cent.

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The growth of the wealth-management business helped boost the bank’s fee income by 50 per cent in the first half, while its private bank operating income increased by 60 per cent, Yuen said.

Rich mainland clients liked to set up family offices in Hong Kong “as a platform for them to diversify their investment portfolio”, she said, adding that as an international financial centre, the city offered them a wide range of international products to invest in.

Family offices are entities created by affluent individuals or families to manage their investments, succession planning and philanthropic activities.

CNCBI is the Hong Kong unit of mainland China’s Citic Bank, which is under the Citic Group. The group, established in 1979 by Rong Yiren with the support of late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, has developed into a conglomerate with businesses in finance, manufacturing, infrastructure and other sectors.

“Being part of the Citic Group is important as the brand is well known on the mainland,” Yuen said. “Our wealth-management customers can also get services from other units of the group as we can offer them trustee, investment banking, securities trading and other services.”

In addition, mainland enterprises that open accounts at CNCBI can tap Citic’s other units around the world to support global expansion. The group’s securities arm would also help such customers raise funds in Hong Kong by issuing bonds or stocks to tap the city’s active capital market, Yuen said.

“While CNCBI is a mid-tier bank in Hong Kong, mainland customers like our bankers in Hong Kong to help them expand globally because Citic is a well-established large conglomerate,” she said.

Like larger peers including HSBC and Standard Chartered, CNCBI has invested in private banking in the city. Its new centre, which opened on September 29 in Citic Tower in Admiralty, offers a 180-degree view over Victoria Harbour. With a gross floor area of about 15,000 sq ft, it is double the size of the bank’s previous centre in Lippo Centre and offers 17 locally themed meeting rooms.

“Both local and wealthy mainland customers like to meet with our bankers, not just to manage their wealth but also to experience the cultural aspects of the city,” Yuen said. This was why the bank arranged cultural events, such as visits to the Art Basel show and the M+ museum, as well as exclusive cocktail receptions, she added.

Even in a digital age, physical venues played an important role in private banking and the wealth-management business, Yuen said. Besides its new private banking centre, CNCBI is upgrading many of its more than 20 branches.

“While clients may conduct simple banking transactions online, they would like to have a face-to-face meeting with their bankers in person to discuss financial planning, setting up of family offices and other complicated matters,” she said. “The 17 rooms of the new private banking centre are always fully booked.”

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.