Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金控), the nation's biggest financial service company by assets, yesterday said its third-quarter profit grew 15 percent quarter-on-quarter to NT$12.3 billion (US$380 million).
Net income in the first nine months more than doubled to NT$33 billion from NT$13.1 billion a year earlier as a result of stock investment gains by insurance subsidiary Cathay Life Insurance Co (
Nine-month profits exceeded the company's record for full-year profits -- NT$29.8 billion in 2004 -- Bloomberg said.
Among its asset allocation, the return on its NT$201 billion investment in domestic stocks was the highest at 21.87 percent, followed by a 7.6 percent return on NT$59.8 billion in investment in overseas stocks.
Speaking at an investor conference, chief strategy officer Lee Chang-ken (
"I don't think we'll post any major losses in the near future given that 85 percent of our assets are NT dollar-denominated and the remaining investments are secured with low risk," Lee said.
Lee said the US subprime mortgage crisis has limited impact on Cathay Financial, as the company has only NT$4 billion in subprime-related investments, most of which are bank-secured, while its NT$4.3 billion in provisions on NT$14 billion in bad loans is also adequate.
The company's dividend pay-out ratio may average between 65 percent and 80 percent, Lee said.
The company's insurance segment contributed NT$10.9 billion, or 73 percent, to its nine-month profit after seeing a nearly 33 percent growth in premium income from last year.
Its second-most profitable unit, Cathay United Bank, saw a slight growth in corporate lending and mortgages with the shrinking of problematic consumer lending. Its wealth-management businesses reaped a 137 percent growth from a year earlier.
Cathay Life is set to speed up its expansion into 11 Chinese cities, aiming to increase its Shanghai subsidiary's first-year premium income from 1 percent to 3 percent of its total contribution in 2010, Lee said.
Cathay Life (Shanghai) posted 328 million yuan (US$75.5 million) in first-year premium income in the first nine months of the year, up 43 percent from last year.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS