Standard & Poor's Ratings Services (S&P) said yesterday that because of effective government action, a run on The Chinese Bank (中華銀行), a member of Rebar Asia Pacific Group (力霸亞太企業集團), is not expected to have a significant impact on system confidence or stability.
The government tends to support imperiled retail deposit-taking financial institutions and it vowed to protect The Chinese Bank's depositors, who account for less than 1 percent of total banking deposits, S&P said.
The possible collapse of the highly leveraged Rebar Group is not expected to hit the banking industry too hard, given that lending to the two insolvent group affiliates is estimated at only 0.2 percent of total outstanding loans, while overall lending to the Rebar Group is estimated at less than 1 percent, S&P said.
Still, shares for the financial sector were down by 2.23 percent on the main bourse yesterday due to lingering worries over the troubled Rebar Group, outperforming a decline of 1.17 percent on the benchmark TAIEX.
S&P yesterday said Taiwan's bad loan ratio would stand at 3 percent to 4 percent for the end of last year.
The impact on Mega International Commercial Bank (兆豐國際商銀), one of the largest creditors for the group, is expected to be minimal because its exposure accounts for only a small proportion of its total business, the ratings agency said.
Mega International is a banking unit of Mega Financial Holding Co (兆豐金控). Its moderate profitability and satisfactory capitalization are likely to absorb any potential increase in credit costs, according to S&P.
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