Taishin Financial Holding Co (
"The takeover will not happen this year, as there is still long way to go to the merger," Chang Hwa president Julius Chen (陳淮舟) said at a media event yesterday.
Business expansion and stabilizing employees' morale are Chang Hwa's priorities, Chen said, adding that neither side had touched on the issue of hiring financial advisers.
Chen, former president of Taishin Financial, became head of Chang Hwa in February and represents the financial group's holdings in the lender.
Taishin Financial currently has control over eight out of Chang Hwa's 15 board seats.
The financial group is required to offload a 2.5 percent stake in Chang Hwa by June 15 after it failed to meet the industry regulator's financial requirements in stepping up its shareholding to 30 percent by above-mentioned deadline.
The bank understood that Taishin Financial would dispose of those shares on the open market, Chang Hwa vice president William Lin (
Chang Hwa posted pre-tax earnings of NT$14.69 billion (US$443.6 million), or NT$2.87 per share, last year, while Taishin Financial had a net loss of NT$16.1 billion.
Profits this year are expected to stay similar to last year's, Chang Hwa's new spokesman James Shih (
The lender is expected to boost its fee income to 15 percent of total income from 12 percent, or NT$2.97 billion, last year, and hopes to obtain a long-awaited wealth management license in time to formally inaugurate the business in the second half of this year, Chen said.
Meanwhile, First Financial Holding Co (第一金控) said in a Taiwan Stock Exchange filing yesterday that it had not conducted any evaluation of a plan to buy shares in Taiwan Business Bank (台灣企銀), dismissing a report by the Chinese-language Commercial Times.
Citing First Financial chairman Michael Chang (張兆順), the report said that First Financial was considering to buy a 13.4 percent stake in Taiwan Business Bank from Mega Financial Holding Co (兆豐金控), which would make it the second-biggest shareholder in the bank, with a 15.8 percent stake.
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