UBS AG and Citigroup Inc said they are hiring more private bankers to serve Taiwan, where the richest citizens hold more wealth than in any Asian country except for China and Japan.
UBS will add 30 private bankers here this year for a total of 80, Dennis Chen (陳允懋), who oversees the company's onshore private-banking business in Taipei, said in an interview.
Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas and ABN Amro Holding NV said they will also add bankers to cater to the nation's wealthy.
Taiwan had 210,000 citizens at home and abroad with net assets of at least US$1 million in 2005, controlling about US$585 billion of wealth, according to the Boston Consulting Group, which advises private banks. Taiwan trailed China by only US$215 billion, but has only less than 2 percent of the latter's population.
"Taiwan is not only an amazing market when you look at its net-worth per capita, but also a very deep market in terms of wealth concentration," said Peter Tung, a managing director for Morgan Stanley's Private Wealth Management in Asia.
People with at least US$5 million in assets own 15 percent of Taiwan's financial wealth, Boston Consulting estimates, almost twice Australia's 8 percent.
Taiwan's rich also generate higher-than-average revenue for private banks because they use more services and trade investments more actively, said Tjun Tang, a Hong Kong-based managing director of Boston Consulting.
Private banks earn about 1.5 percent annually managing offshore assets of Taiwan citizens, compared with 0.95 percent for all of Asia, Tang said.
Taiwan's wealthy are seeking private bankers, often offshore, because of insecurity over tensions with China and high tax rates, Chen of UBS said.
Private bankers, who often require that clients have at least US$1 million in assets, provide customized services that include advice on taxes and managing investments and inheritance plans.
Taiwan's inheritance tax of up to 50 percent is among the highest in Asia. Hong Kong has no such tax, while Singapore's is up to 10 percent. Also, the nation's top personal income tax rate of 40 percent is more than twice that of Hong Kong.
High taxes make Taiwan "so unattractive" for the wealthy to park money compared with locations such as Hong Kong, said Sherry Lin (
The nation's wealthy may try to move more money offshore before a tax on overseas income takes effect as early as 2009 and the government tightens monitoring of funds sent overseas.
Citizens can move up to US$5 million out of Taiwan each year without needing approval from the central bank.
Political tensions across the Taiwan Strait has also increased demand for safe havens.
"We have noticed accelerating outflows in the past two years," said Oliver Yu, a senior manager of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in Taipei, adding that the nation's rich most often stash their money in Hong Kong and Singapore, but increasingly also in Switzerland.
Offshore private banking has also flourished to serve successful entrepreneurs active abroad, including in China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. Citigroup keeps a "significant portion" of its team serving the island's rich in Singapore and Hong Kong, said Richard Straus, a global marketing manager for its private-banking business for Taiwanese.
Issues can arise for private bankers that operate offshore. They aren't allowed to solicit clients living in Taiwan by telephone or on visits to Taiwan, Financial Supervisory Commission Deputy Chairwoman Susan Chang (
The restrictions aren't severe enough to slow the flow of individual assets overseas, said Sabrina Wang, who is a manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Wealthy Taiwanese move money offshore partly because of a wider selection of investments than at home.
"People have far more and better opportunities to grow assets abroad," Wang said.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS