HSBC Ltd announced yesterday it would team up with Eastern Home Shopping Network (
"We will be where the consumers are," HSBC senior manager Michael Zung (陳民康) told a press conference yesterday.
The bank expects to reach more customers and increase brand awareness through its partnership with Eastern Home, Taiwan's largest shopping channel with 3.5 million viewers, the banker said.
This marks HSBC's first alliance with a TV shopping network in Asia. Taiwan is the third largest home shopping market worldwide in terms of revenue, after South Korea and the US, the world's largest bank said.
The campaign comprises two one-hour shows, both of which will run during prime time this Saturday afternoon and next on one of Eastern Home's channels. Further cooperation will be predicated on the results of this initial activity.
The bank, however, declined to state how many customers it expects to lure.
HSBC's Direct online banking service allows customers to open and manage their saving accounts through the Internet and via telephone, rather than at traditional branches, and boasts annual interest rates triple those of regular saving accounts on the market.
The service has been positively received and has attracted as many customers since its rollout eight weeks ago than it takes traditional branches five years to attract, Zung said.
The bank said it was in talks with corporate clients to extend the model to the lucrative payroll account business.
HSBC has invested US$20 million in the direct online/telephone banking service project in Taiwan, making the nation the third market worldwide -- and the first in Asia -- where it has launched the service.
The bank has plans to introduce the service in South Korea and Japan. The two countries have over 20 million and 60 million Internet users, respectively.
The bank did not give a timeframe for these operations.
Organic growth
HSBC president and chief executive officer Michael Smith said last month that the bank will continue its organic growth through investment in new channels like the Internet.
Some local lenders have also launched promotions to woo online banking customers, with Chinatrust Commercial Bank (
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by