HSBC is selling its 44-story London headquarters, Britain’s second-tallest skyscraper, for £772.5 million (nearly US$1.3 billion), the bank said on Friday.
HSBC Bank PLC said it struck the all-cash deal with the National Pension Service of Korea. HSBC will continue to occupy 8 Canada Square, in east London’s Canary Wharf financial district, paying the new owner £46 million in rent per year for the next 17 1/2 years.
HSBC recently made a tidy profit on a similar deal with Spanish real estate company Metrovacesa SA, which purchased the building from HSBC in 2007 for nearly £1.1 billion, only to sell it back at a loss of about £250 million a year later.
The sheer glass skyscraper is about 200 meters high.
It shares the title of Britain’s second-tallest office building with the nearby 15 Canada Square, occupied by Citigroup, according to Skyscrapernews.com, a website which compiles building data.
Both are outstripped by their neighbour, One Canada Square, which stands about 235 meters tall.
HSBC moved into its building in 2002. It houses 8,000 staff in about 1.1 million square feet (100,000 square metres) of floor space.
HSBC has weathered the banking crisis better than many of its rivals. On Tuesday it said in a trading update that pretax profit for the third quarter was ’significantly ahead’ of the same quarter last year.
The bank’s shares rose 1.3 per cent on Friday to 741.7 pence on the London Stock Exchange.
Source: Business Times, 14 Nov 2009
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