State-run Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行), the nation's largest lender, said yesterday that it would swap one of its own shares for every two shares of state-owned Central Trust of China (中央信託局) when the two banks merge.
Bank of Taiwan will issue 500 million new shares for the merger, which was announced in November last year, it said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
The merger is scheduled for July 1 next year, the statement read.
Bank of Taiwan will acquire Central Trust of China to create the nation's largest financial group, under a government plan to make lenders more competitive.
The merger will form a group that controls 11.6 percent of the market, according to the Ministry of Finance.
Meanwhile, Standard & Poor's (S&P) Ratings Services yesterday reaffirmed its "A+" long-term and "A-1" short-term counterparty credit ratings on Bank of Taiwan with a stable outlook.
"The ratings reflect the bank's strong franchise and market position, satisfactory asset quality, high liquidity and sound capitalization," S&P's credit analyst Susan Chu (朱素徵) said.
"Additional positive rating factors include the bank's systemic importance to Taiwan's financial services industry, administrative functions it carries out on behalf of the government, and its 100 percent ownership by the government," Chu said.
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