Bankers yesterday urged the government to release the shares it owns in state-owned banks to accelerate the financial-service sector's consolidation.
"It's about time that the government began to think about relinquishing its grip on the banking sector," Victor Kung (
According to Kung, 60 percent of savings are held in state-owned banks, which tend to provide less competitive financial services than their private counterparts.
Kung said that the privatization of state-owned banks would help boost the financial sector's performance and health.
Du Ying-tzyong (杜英宗), chairman of Citigroup Global Markets Taiwan Ltd, said he expected to see more mergers and acquisitions among state-owned banks and local financial holding companies in the next year.
He suggested that state-owned banks that are rich in assets should seek mergers or strategic partnerships with efficient private banks.
Earlier this year, Minister of Finance Lin Chuan (林全) said that the ministry wanted to see a second wave of mergers and acquisitions among financial holding companies to further beef up the banking sector's competitiveness.
The minister said the nation still had too many banks and that none of the subsidiary banking units of the nation's 14 financial holding companies had a market share above 10 percent.
A lack of innovation to stimulate demand is also troubling many domestic banks, since many of them are competing for the same niche markets, Du said.
Innovative financial products could create NT$400 million worth of business opportunities, he suggested.
Du said that the government's failure to create an "exit system" to allow banks to fail and policies that encourage differentiated management among banks was another major reason behind the nation's over-banking problems.
Du endorsed the gov-ernment's policy initiative to allow hostile takeovers in the financial sector.
He said that allowing hostile takeovers would motivate managers to become more performance-oriented and would result in the removal of ill-performing managers.
Julius Chen (
According to Chen, the cost-income ratio of the banking sector averaged 70 percent, compared with 39 percent in Singapore and 42 percent in Hong Kong.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts