But also two is some of the softness we’ve seen in the economic conditions in Hong Kong, which we start to see reversing. And we’ve been encouraged by the policy measures that have been taken by way of supporting the economy. And if those materialize, we will start seeing some pickup in the segment. Now outside this softness area, we do still have strong loan growth potential in growing areas in our geographies such as Southeast Asia, such as India, such as the Middle East. We even had growth in some of the Western economies. So that is happening. Quite importantly also, I want to call out growth in trade. I called it out in the earlier kind of speech if you want, but trade is bucking the trend for the first quarter where we see 3% growth in our loan book after several quarters of decline.
And that’s encouraging. We’ll obviously need to see how it evolves. But that’s definitely encouraging. And if you look at it, most of that growth is in Asia, which means it’s bucking the trend in Asia, and that’s probably on the — certainly on the backdrop. Now the trade between China and ASEAN has exceeded trade between China and Europe or China and U.S. and that obviously will benefit given our footprint in China and ASEAN. On the special dividend, Gurpreet, at this stage we’re aiming for completion of Canada sometime in Q1. We will then have to go through due governance and do approvals before we do it. I think H1 ’24 is reasonable to expect, but it’s obviously at this stage just a matter of a process we need to go through. I think that’s what I can say at this stage.
We’ll pay it as soon as we can, Gurpreet. That’s what we can say at this stage. Thank you, Gurpreet. Next question, please.
Operator: Our next question today comes from Manus Costello from Autonomous. Please accept the prompt to unmute your line and ask your question.
Manus Costello: Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Can I probe you a bit more on the hedging that you’ve got in place? You’ve talked about increased hedging for the last couple of quarters and you have this quarter as you discussed previously taken some losses [indiscernible] portfolio to improve NII next year, but we lack a kind of an overall understanding of what you’ve got in terms of the hedge. And so my question specifically is, how big is your hedge? And what’s the duration of your hedge so that we can do some modeling to understand how much protection you’ve got into ’24 and beyond? Thank you.
Georges Elhedery: Thank you, Manus, a very insightful question. We are intending to have much more disclosure around our structural hedge at the full year. We’re planning to give you additional disclosures from the one we already give today, which is the usual NII table with multiple rate shifts over the five years that includes duration, that includes yields on the structural hedge, et cetera, which hopefully can allow you to model all of this. We’re not ready to do it at Q3. It will be more appropriate to do it at the full year. I think what you should take into account is some of the information we shared at the half year, which is the hedge itself has allowed us to reduce our NII sensitivity at the back end of last year from $6 billion for 100 basis points down to now $2.6 billion, over which you should add the funding of the trading book sensitivity of 1.3. So that’s giving you an idea of how much the overall hedge among other contributors have supported the reduction of NII volatility and our NII sensitivity to the downward pressure on weights [ph].
And I think you should definitely assume that it remains our intention at this phase of the cycle in rates to continue doing hedges as appropriate across all our balance sheets where we can find them. So more on that at the full year, Manus. Thank you for the question.
Manus Costello: A solid quarter. Thank you.
Operator: Our next question today comes from Raul Sinha from JPMorgan. Please accept the prompt to unmute your line and ask your question.
