For Banking Group, Australian Open Becomes a Marketing Opportunity in China

An avid tennis fan and amateur player, Katrina Taylor was watching the fourth-seeded Li Na at the Australian Open when she noticed something odd: The courtside signage was in Chinese.

“Something about it was familiar; I knew the colors, but I wondered what it said and what it meant,” Mrs. Taylor said. “It was a bit strange.”

Michael Smith, the chief executive of the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, is hoping Mrs. Taylor will not be the only fan to sit up and take notice. His plan is for eyeballs across Asia to land on his bank’s corporate signage, strategically placed to reach millions of potential customers while China’s biggest tennis star moves through the rounds of the Grand Slam tournament being held in Melbourne.

The bank, known as ANZ, is a sponsor of the tournament, and is using the Chinese-language displays particularly when Ms. Li takes to the court, alongside its regular corporate branding in English. Joyce Phillips, group managing director of marketing and innovation at ANZ, said she and Mr. Smith had first discussed using Chinese signage, which reads simply “Australia and New Zealand Bank,” when they watched Ms. Li at the Australian Open in 2011.

“The first time we put it up was when Li Na played” this past week, Ms. Phillips said of the Chinese-language advertising. “The broadcast numbers are magnificently huge in China. And we are leveraging the numbers we get when Li Na plays.”

It is an advertising strategy that has been widely used in other sports with global audiences, and Jacob’s Creek, an Australian winery, also has Chinese signs at the Open.

Ms. Li’s first appearance in singles competition at the Australian Open was in 2005. She has been runner-up twice, in 2011 and 2013, and she reached the semifinals in 2010. On Thursday, she advanced to the finals in the women’s singles event, which will be held Saturday.

Mr. Smith, who took over in 2007 as chief executive of ANZ, was already familiar with banking in Asia, having spent almost three decades at HSBC. ANZ had courted Asian business before and been rebuffed, but it added a lotus-shaped symbol to its name, with three distinct segments representing the desire to earn its income from Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region.

Scott Manning, a banking analyst at JPMorgan, said that ANZ had more recently picked up trade finance activity in Asia, often following Australian customers doing business with China, Australia’s largest trade partner. The bank says it is open in 28 countries across the Asia-Pacific region, and has branches in the Chinese cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Hangzhou. It also has technology and mortgage processing centers in Manila and Bangalore, India.

“The concept is higher economic growth leads to higher banking growth,” said Brett Le Mesurier, a banking analyst with BBY, a brokerage firm based in Sydney. “Asia is growing faster than Australia, and there is a lot of business that flows from Australia into Asia and back again. The question is, can they get a good enough return on their equity?”

ANZ has made the biggest bet on Asia among its Australian peers. It has a market value of about 84 billion Australian dollars, or about $73 billion, and posted a net profit of 6.3 billion dollars in the year that ended Sept. 30, a result in line with expectations, and up 11 percent from a year earlier.

Australia’s big four banks all made record profits in that year. The country’s biggest bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, reported a full-year profit of 7.7 billion dollars; Westpac Bank made 6.8 billion dollars; and National Australia Bank made 5.5 billion dollars.

Mr. Smith has said, “The continued shift of global growth to Asia means that our strategy focused on building an Asia-connected bank makes more sense than ever.”

And he said he believed that many of ANZ’s customers were watching the Australian Open.

More eye-catching are the broadcast statistics. Last year, more than 300 million people around the globe watched the tournament, and more than 19 million people in China watched Victoria Azarenka of Belarus defend her title against Ms. Li, a record for a single broadcast, said Dan Metcalfe, the Asia-Pacific sales manager for the event’s organizer, Tennis Australia.

Ms. Phillips said that ANZ was aiming for as much of the Asian market as possible with its multilingual signs. The bank also is a sponsor of the Shanghai Rolex Masters tournament and started a grass-roots effort last year to conduct small-scale tennis clinics for children in China in conjunction with the local authorities.

Mr. Le Mesurier of BBY said the Asian push reflected tough conditions in the bank’s home market. Although Australian banks are making strong profits, the outlook for growth is not so clear.

“It is very hard for new entrants,” he said. “You don’t get much of a return, and it is very competitive getting a foothold in any new market.”

During his tenure, Mr. Smith increased the bank’s stake in Panin Bank in Indonesia to 39 percent. ANZ also holds 24 percent of AMMB in Malaysia, and in China, 20 percent of Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank and 18 percent of Bank of Tianjin. In 2009, ANZ purchased some of Royal Bank of Scotland’s Asian consumer businesses for about 687 million Australian dollars, signaling an intent to stand on its own. But to date it has had greater success with institutional banking business than retail banking.

“They started by buying equity stakes in existing players in Asia to get a better understanding of the market,” Mr. Manning of JPMorgan said. “There’s now a push to be there in their own right.”

ANZ wants to generate 25 percent to 30 percent of its earnings outside Australia and New Zealand by 2017, up from about 16 percent currently, Mr. Manning said. ANZ does not break out financial figures for Asia.

“The plan has always been to understand the market through partnerships, look to build an organic presence and then exit the equity stakes,” Mr. Manning said. “It is a question of timing.” He added that tennis sponsorship was smart: “It reflects where their customer is.”