Shin Kong Life Insurance Co (新光人壽), a subsidiary of Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控), and 12 competitors have expressed interest in acquiring the Agora Garden (亞太會館) hotel in Taipei City's Xinyi District (信義), auctioneer DTZ Debenham Tie Leung (戴德梁行) said yesterday.
"So far, we've shown the property to 12 potential bidders, although we don't know for sure who will actually show up and place bids," said a manager at the international real-estate consultancy who requested anonymity.
Potential bidders for the property, which is set for auction on March 28, must put down a deposit of NT$400 million (US$12.7 million) between March 20 and March 26 to secure entry to the auction.
A floor price of NT$6.9 billion has been set for the 14-story Agora Garden hotel and the minimum bidding unit has been set at NT$40 million, the manager said.
The five-star hotel, which sits on a 2,468 ping (0.82 hectare) lot of land, has a total floor space of 12,458 ping, with 213 guest rooms and an occupancy rate of 80 percent on average during the past three years, the auctioneer said.
After Shin Kong Life Insurance said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange that it would bid for the property, market watchers expect the deal's closing price to jump to as much as NT$8 billion, a report in the Chinese-language Economic Daily said on Saturday.
The board of Shin Kong Life Insurance also announced that the company, headed by chairman Eugene Wu (
Wu was upbeat about the prospects for Taipei's luxury home property market and predicted that land prices for luxury property could soon jump to NT$3 million per ping, media reported.
According to Shin Kong Financial spokesman Victor Hsu (許澎), the insurer's assets under management were NT$1.4 trillion, of which 8 percent were budgeted for real estate investments.
Should Shin Kong win the bid for Agora Garden, it will retain the hotel's present management until projects for luxury homes mature, Hsu said.
Shin Kong was also to bid today for a 300 ping parcel of land on Hangzhou S Road in Taipei City.
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
MORE WEIGHT: The national weighting was raised in one index while holding steady in two others, while several companies rose or fell in prominence MSCI Inc, a global index provider, has raised Taiwan’s weighting in one of its major indices and left the country’s weighting unchanged in two other indices after a regular index review. In a statement released on Thursday, MSCI said it has upgraded Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country World Index by 0.02 percentage points to 2.25 percent, while maintaining the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, the most closely watched by foreign institutional investors, at 20.46 percent. Additionally, the index provider has left Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country Asia ex-Japan Index unchanged at 23.15 percent. The latest index adjustments are to
RSS