Financiers and entrepreneurs packed the Shangri-La’s ballrooms during the global Wharton alumni gathering in Singapore, huddling in groups and tables over gourmet buffet meals with the latest news on Silicon Valley Bank’s spectacular implosion on Friday being the main topic of conversation.
In Mumbai, startup founders and investors at a conference talked about nothing else, exchanging rumours about which fledgling company might be the first to fall. In Shanghai, SVB’s local partner and joint venture issued memos within hours of each other, seeking to calm worries about their stability.
In the past days, the region’s tech luminaries and family offices have watched with a mix of fear and fascination at the meltdown that engulfed a decades-old bank which once carried $200 billion of assets. The collapse sent shockwaves through Asia as major investors and sovereign funds rushed to check the exposure of their portfolios and investees to the failed lender, according to people familiar with the matter.
At an investment firm that backs ByteDance Ltd., executives were glued to their screens as they monitored SVB’s stock price and news headlines on Thursday night in Beijing, before deciding overnight to pull their funds out of the bank.
An executive of Airbnb-style lodgings service Xiaozhu, warned by its venture backers, pulled over on an expressway to withdraw the company’s deposits over the phone, and succeeded, one of the people said. A representative for Xiaozhu declined to comment.
Others weren’t so lucky. An Indian founder told Bloomberg he failed to retrieve company funds and is now left only with working capital. Another was scurrying to stop and reroute customer payments into his company’s SVB account, while also setting up new arrangements for salary payments. Three founders and a startup investor said they hadn’t slept in 48 hours.
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