GE Capital seeks to boost presence in Asia-Pacific region

General Electric Capital Corp, a finance arm of General Electric Co, yesterday finished the first leg of its Asian road show in Taipei, vowing to reinforce its investor focus in the Asia-Pacific region.

Asian investors bought US$650 million, or 5 percent, of US$12.9 billion in bonds and commercial paper GE Capital issued last year.

Lauding Taiwan's efforts in liberalizing its financial markets, the US company said it planned to issue up to US$60 billion-worth of global depositary receipts (GDR) this year, 10 percent of which will be reserved for the Asia-Pacific region, Aris Kekedjian, managing director of GE Capital's newly established fixed-income investor relations, told reporters on Monday.

Kekedjian, along with his assistant treasurer Kathleen Yoh, visited the central bank and several investment banks after the Monday road show in Taipei, expressing their interest and commitment to reinforcing investor relations here.

GE Capital is one of the companies that came to Taiwan to soak up some of the non-performing loans (NPL) that were plaguing the banking system, buying NT$56.5 billion of bad loans from the state-controlled First Commercial Bank (第一銀行) in July 2002.

The government has pressured domestic lenders to accelerate write-offs of troubled loans that have accumulated over the past five decades.

In 2002, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) vowed to reduce the nation's NPL ratio to below 5 percent and raise the banking sector's capital adequacy ratio to above 8 percent within two years. As of Dec. 31 last year, the NPL ratio of domestic banks had fallen to 6.08 percent -- worth about NT$885.8 billion -- from 7.87 percent at the end of September, the central bank said earlier this month.

Following GE Capital's experience in the non-performing loan market, Kekedjian said during the road show that the company didn't rule out the possibility of issuing New Taiwan dollar-denominated bonds. But this would be a long-term plan, he added, without elaborating.

After winding up his Taipei trip yesterday, Kekedjian is scheduled to proceed with his Asian road show in Seoul and Tokyo.