HSBC is selling its 44-story London headquarters, Britain's second-tallest skyscraper, for 772.5 million pounds (nearly $1.3 billion), the bank said 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 pounds 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 S.A., which purchased the building from HSBC in 2007 for nearly 1.1 billion pounds, only to sell it back at a loss of about 250 million pounds a year later.
The sheer glass skyscraper is about 200 meters (655 feet) 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 Web site which compiles building data.
Both are outstripped by their neighbor, One Canada Square, which stands about 235 meters (771 feet) tall.
HSBC moved into its building in 2002. It houses 8,000 staff in about 1.1 million square feet (100,000 square meters) 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 percent Friday to 741.7 pence on the London Stock Exchange.
