SinoPac Holdings Co (永豐金控) chief executive officer and president Paul Lo (盧正昕) will retire from his post after the company holds its annual shareholders meeting next month, although the market is speculating that his departure has something to do with the company's growing losses in structured investment vehicles (SIVs).
In a statement released yesterday, SinoPac Holdings said Lo would also quit his position as chief financial officer of SinoPac Holdings and chairman of Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行), as the 64-year-old Lo is approaching his retirement age, the statement said.
SinoPac Holdings said its board approved Lo’s retirement application yesterday and will appoint a replacement for him from the financial industry soon after the June 6 meeting, chairman Ho Show-chuan (何壽川) said in the statement.
Ho praised Lo for his efforts in expanding the lender over the past six years into a financial group with NT$1 trillion (US$33 billion) in total capital and 8,000 employees.
But the market has long speculated that Lo would one day take responsibility for Bank SinoPac’s exposure to SIVs in relation to the US subprime mortgage crisis.
Bank SinoPac reported a net loss of NT$500 million last year after writing down 46 percent of its NT$12.6 billion portfolio in credit derivatives (largely SIVs). In comparison, it reported a net profit of NT$2.5 billion in 2006.
Lo will continue on as a board member of SinoPac Holdings and serving as chairman of Far East National Bank, as the company needs Lo to take charge of a plan to dispose of this US banking subsidiary, the statement said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to