Taiwan Cooperative Bank (
Heavy demand may push prices much higher, the bank's management said yesterday.
"Share prices will be decided by the market; our first offering [in early October] averaged NT$25.39 per share," bank president Soo Jin-fong (蘇金豐) said after launching the bank's wealth management services.
Today's listing will also pave the way to accelerate the bank's planned privatization next year. The government plans to release a 13.8 percent stake, Soo said, adding that this will reduce the government's ownership from the current 60 percent to 46.2 percent.
The future sale of the government's 13.8 percent stake -- or 305 billion shares -- is expected to generate some NT$5 billion for the nation's coffers, Vice Finance Minister Gordon Chen (陳樹) said.
In the first stage of its IPO, Taiwan Cooperative raised NT$190.4 million (US$5.6 million), auctioning off a total of 7.5 million shares last month at an average price of NT$25.39, higher than the base price of NT$13.95, according to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Taiwan Cooperative currently has NT$22 billion in working capital and NT$2 trillion in assets with a net value of NT$61 billion. As of September, the bank had NT$1.65 trillion in savings and NT$1.19 trillion in loans, with a market share of 8.88 percent and 8.66 percent respectively.
The bank's non-performing loan (NPL) ratio (excluding loans under observation) fell from last year's 6.17 percent to 3.79 percent last month. The bank aims to further lower the figure to 3.5 percent by the year's end and 2.5 percent next year, Soo said.
The bank doesn't rule out a recapitalization in the near future, as far as improving the bank's capital adequacy ratio is concerned, Chairman Sean Chen (
"Ideally, banks should have a minimum capital adequacy ratio of 10 percent," Chen said.
Capital adequacy is a measure of a bank's financial strength, usually expressed as the ratio of its capital to its assets.
According to Chen, the bank had previously issued subordinated debt, which he considered as having a higher cost, to raise its capital adequacy from the previous 8.4 percent to the current 9.2 percent.
Chen also denied market speculation that the bank will expand into a financial holding company by merging with other smaller state-owned banks.
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained