In a bid to promote the nation's fledgling offshore bond market, the Financial Supervisory Commission said yesterday that it planned to allow branches of qualified foreign financial institutions to issue bonds on the foreign-currency denominated bourse.
According to current practice, only headquarters of publicly traded overseas financial institutions are eligible to issue bonds on the offshore bonds exchange, named Formosa Bond.
The relaxation in regulations will, for example, allow Deutsche Bank's London branch to issue bonds on the offshore exchange, the commission said.
The financial regulator is also considering allowing subsidiaries of foreign firms listed on the 18 bourses worldwide that are partners to the Taiwan Stock Exchange -- including the New York Stock Exchange -- to make their initial offering of corporate bonds on Taiwan's offshore bourse.
HSBC Ltd said earlier this month that it planned to issue the offshore market's third batch of foreign currency-denominated bonds worth around NT$8.6 billion by the end of the second quarter.
Deutsche Bank is the first issuer with US$250 million in bonds, followed by BNP Paribas' maximum of A$500 million.
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
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