BNP Paribas is mulling whether to issue its second batch of foreign currency-denominated bonds on the nation's offshore bond exchange, the bank said yesterday.
"We are committed to the market ? and plan to issue [similar products] regularly," Laurent de Meyere, president of BNP Paribas' Taiwan branch, said yesterday.
Mark Adams, head of Asia-Pacific debt capital markets at BNP Paribas' Hong Kong branch, said the company could issue bonds on behalf of renowned European companies, such as BMW, in order to attract investors in Taiwan, which is a brand-conscious market.
Issuing structured notes targeted at institutional investors is also an option, he said, without elaborating.
BNP Paribas has just completed issuing its first batch of Australian currency-denominated bonds worth A$308 million (US$258 million). The product was listed for trading on April 10.
Four or five foreign financial institutions are interested in rolling out bonds products and are in talks with local underwriters at the moment, said Lee Shyan-yuan (李賢源), a policy-making member of the Financial Supervisory Commission, who is also the major promoter and designer of the offshore bond market, Formosa Bond.
John Lee (李鐘培), head of HSBC Ltd's capital markets division, said last month that the bank planned to launch a bond by the end of the current quarter.
The bond market has great potential to be explored as only US$500 million of bonds are currently in issue, compared to the US$79 billion of foreign currency savings in both domestic and offshore business units, FSC's Lee said.
This week’s undoing of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and its sister token, Luna, has ramifications for all of crypto. First, there is the immediate impact: The rapid collapse of a once-popular pair of cryptocurrencies sent a ripple effect across the industry, contributing to plummeting coin prices that wiped hundreds of billions of market value from the digital-asset market and stoked worries over the potential fragility of digital-asset ventures. Then there are the knock-on effects. In addition to delivering punishing losses to individual users and investment firms, the spectacular failure of a market darling like Terra threatens to have a cooling effect
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said that its board of directors approved a proposal to subsidize employees’ purchases of TSMC shares by covering 15 percent of investments, the chipmaker’s latest effort to recruit and retain talent. Employees of TSMC and its fully owned subsidiaries would be allowed to allocate 15 to 20 percent of their monthly salary for share purchases, based on a company employee stock purchase plan, the chipmaker told the Taipei Times. The plan is to take effect in August or September, it said. The board also approved the distribution of a cash dividend of NT$2.75 per share for
PRODUCTION VALUE: The institute said production value of the foundry sector is expected to grow 28 percent this year after TSMC posted record revenue for April The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) yesterday raised its growth forecast for Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, expecting production value to expand about 19.4 percent to NT$4.88 trillion (US$164.24 billion) this year, primarily aided by stronger growth from foundry companies amid a chip crunch. That means the output of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry would again outpace that of its global peers, which collectively are expected to grow 10.4 percent this year, ITRI said. The institute three months ago estimated that the production value of the nation’s semiconductor industry would grow 17.7 percent annually to NT$4.81 trillion this year, compared with NT$4.08 trillion last year. The
China’s biggest chipmaker has cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC, 中芯) estimates a month-long lockdown in Shanghai could spur component shortages and logistics tangles, and erase about 5 percent of its output in the second quarter. “We are trying our best to mitigate the impact on product delivery,” SMIC Chairman Gao Yonggang (高永崗) told analysts on a call yesterday morning. “We are still assessing the actual impact as many suppliers restart their