The bridge
Ninth in a series on Portuguese companies and investors in Asia — what they built, what survived, and what is still being built today.
立足港澳 · 橋連世界 Rooted in Hong Kong and Macau, bridging to the world. — Motto of 立橋銀行, Banco Well Link, Macau
There is a bank in Macau that opens every day of the year. It has seven branches, a Chinese name, 立橋銀行 (Lìqiáo Yínháng in Chinese pinyin), and a Portuguese one, Banco Well Link. The two characters in its name, 立 and 橋, mean roughly to build a bridge, and at the bank's inauguration in November 2017 its chairman, Zhang Shengman, 章晟曼 — a former managing director of the World Bank — explained the choice. Macau, he said, was a small city, but it was also a bridge between China and the Portuguese-speaking world.
Until that year, the bank had been Portuguese.
This instalment was meant to be a list of departures: the Portuguese companies that sold up and left Macau after 1999. Some of those departures have already appeared in this series — the telephone company in the sixth instalment, the electricity stake that went to China Three Gorges in 2024. But following the bank behind that sign turned up something more interesting than a list. Almost none of the Portuguese exits from Macau were caused by anything that happened in Macau. They were caused by things that happened in Lisbon.
A bank for the handover
In the mid-1990s, with the transfer of sovereignty only a few years away, the Espírito Santo group — then the most powerful banking family in Portugal — set up a bank in Macau. Banco Espírito Santo do Oriente was a wholesale bank, with no high-street branches: corporate lending, trade finance, letters of credit, deposits in several currencies including renminbi, and help for Portuguese companies trying to do business in China. It was the group's only bank in the East Asia.
The timing was deliberate and, on its own terms, shrewd. A Portuguese bank incorporated in Macau before 1999 would be a local institution after 1999, regulated in a Chinese city that still used Portuguese law and still spoke some Portuguese. It was a bet that Macau would remain a door into China for Portuguese business, and that the door was worth owning.
For most of two decades the bet paid modestly. In 2013 the bank reported a net profit of around 45 million patacas.
Lisbon, August 2014
Then the parent failed.
In the summer of 2014, Banco Espírito Santo collapsed under the losses of the wider family group. On 4 August the Bank of Portugal split it in two: the bad assets stayed behind, and the viable business was moved into a new institution called Novo Banco — literally, "New Bank". The Macau subsidiary went with it, and became Novo Banco Ásia, 新銀行亞洲.
Nothing had gone wrong in Macau. The bank was renamed because a family in Lisbon had lost control of its empire. But the consequences arrived in Macau all the same. According to reports at the time in Macau Business, three of the territory's public institutions — the Monetary Authority, the Social Security Fund and the Pension Fund — withdrew deposits totalling some four billion patacas, and Novo Banco had to send more than forty million euros east to keep its Asian unit steady. By 2016 the bank's profit had fallen to about one million patacas on revenue of under 46 million.
Sold, with a reason attached
Novo Banco was itself under orders to shrink and to sell anything outside Portugal and Spain. In 2016 it agreed to sell its Macau bank; the Monetary Authority initially declined to approve the first version of the deal. On 24 May 2017 the sale was completed: 75% of Novo Banco Ásia went to a group of investors led by Well Link Group Holdings, a Hong Kong financial group, for 145.8 million euros.
Novo Banco kept the remaining 25%, with options for it to be bought out within five years. Its statement to the Portuguese securities regulator gave a reason for staying in — one that would have made sense to the Espírito Santos in the 1990s. Keeping "uma presença acionista do NOVO BANCO no capital do NOVO BANCO Ásia nos próximos 5 anos" — a shareholding in the Macau bank for the next five years — would, it said, let it support the exports and internationalisation of Portuguese companies.
When the bank reopened that November as 立橋銀行, its shareholders included the Well Link group, Novo Banco, the family of the late Macau business leader Ma Man Kei 馬萬祺, a Shenzhen property group, and its chairman. Its stated ambition was to connect the Greater Bay Area with the Portuguese-speaking countries. It opened its first retail branch in 2018. By 2025 its assets were reported at close to 39 billion patacas.
The bridge the Espírito Santos had wanted to own was still there. It simply belonged to someone else.
Then Lisbon sold Novo Banco
In October 2017 — five months after the Macau sale — the American private-equity firm Lone Star took 75% of Novo Banco itself. In 2025 Lone Star sold that stake to the French banking group BPCE, which then agreed to buy the Portuguese state's remaining 25% as well. The bank that kept a quarter of its Macau unit to help Portuguese exporters is no longer Portuguese-owned.
I have not been able to confirm whether Novo Banco still holds its stake in 立橋銀行; it was still a shareholder in 2021, and the buy-out options ran to 2022. If any reader knows, I would be glad to hear.
The same story, three times more
Once you see this pattern, it is everywhere.
Banco Comercial de Macau 澳門商業銀行, came into Portuguese hands in 1995, when the Lisbon bank BCP bought its parent, Banco Português do Atlântico. In 2005 BCP sold it, together with Macau's largest general insurer and a life insurer, to Hong Kong's Dah Sing Bank, 大新銀行, for 1,719 million patacas. At the time it was Macau's third-largest bank by number of branches. It still trades under its Portuguese name.
The telephone company. Portugal Telecom sold its stake in CTM to CITIC in 2013. A year later Portugal Telecom itself was dragged into the Espírito Santo collapse, through hundreds of millions of euros it had lent to a family company, and was soon broken up and sold.
The electricity stake. EDP sold its share of CEM to China Three Gorges in 2024 — the company that, as the sixth instalment explained, had bought its way into EDP itself in 2011, when the Portuguese state was selling assets under the terms of the international bailout.
In each case, the decision was taken in Lisbon, by a company with a problem in Lisbon: a family empire collapsing, a bailout requiring privatisations, a balance sheet that needed cash. Macau was where the asset happened to be.
The platform without the Portuguese
There is a paradox at the centre of this, and it is worth stating plainly.
In October 2003, four years after the handover, Beijing established the Forum for Economic and Trade Co-operation between China and Portuguese-speaking Countries — 中葡論壇 (Zhōngpǔ Lùntán), or Forum Macau — with its permanent secretariat in Macau. Its whole purpose was to make Macau the platform between China and the Lusophone world: Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and the rest. The Portuguese language, Portuguese law and Portuguese connections, which might have been expected to fade after 1999, were given an official job.
Over the following twenty years, the Portuguese companies that held Macau's banks, telephones and power sold up. And the new owners took over the job the Forum had described. Well Link Bank 立橋銀行 calls itself a bridge to the Portuguese-speaking world. Its executives talk about linking the Greater Bay Area with Lusophone markets. The bridge was kept. It was the Portuguese who stepped off it.
Who stayed
Not everyone left, and those who stayed are an interesting group.
Banco Nacional Ultramarino 大西洋銀行, from the first instalment, is still there and still prints the territory's banknotes. It is owned by the Portuguese state, through Caixa Geral de Depósitos, which never had to sell it.
Millennium bcp kept a Macau branch, upgraded to a full onshore licence in 2010. But its parent has a story of its own: since 2016 the largest shareholder in BCP has been the Chinese group Fosun 復星, which at one point held nearly 30%. In May 2026 it was reported to hold a little over 20%, and to be testing the market for a buyer.
And Hovione, from the last instalment, is still making medicines in its old firecracker factory in Taipa.
Put those together and the pattern from the last few instalments becomes clearer still. What survived was a state bank, which no creditor could force to sell, and a factory, whose value lay in what it could do rather than what it had been granted. What went, almost without exception, were privately held positions — licences, stakes and franchises — owned by Lisbon companies that needed the money more than they needed Macau.
O que sobrou — what is still there
Banco Well Link 立橋銀行 — a bank founded by a Portuguese family to be a bridge to China, now owned by Chinese investors as a bridge to the Portuguese-speaking world.
Banco Comercial de Macau 澳門商業銀行, still trading under its Portuguese name two decades after Lisbon sold it.
The Forum Macau secretariat 中葡論壇, still in Macau, still describing the city as the platform between China and the Lusophone world.
BNU 大西洋銀行, the bank from the first instalment, still Portuguese and still printing patacas — the one that never had to sell.
Next
The money that left Macau did not stop moving. While Portuguese companies were selling their positions in Asia, Asian companies were buying positions in Portugal: a stake in the national electricity company, the largest shareholding in BCP, the state bank's insurance arm, a hospital group. For five centuries the capital flowed from Lisbon to the East. In the space of a few years after 2011, it turned around.
Next in the series: the reversal — how Asian capital came to Portugal.
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