The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday announced a series of incentives to encourage banks to grant a total of NT$300 billion (US$9.45 billion) in loans to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) through next year.
The commission will rank local banks’ performance on the basis of their contribution or the amount of loans extended as well as growth in lending to SMEs, Lee Chi-hsien (李啟賢), deputy director-general of the Securities and Futures Bureau, told a media briefing yesterday.
The top three performers will be allowed to upgrade their banking offices, which are restricted to a staff of eight, into full-fledged branches and to relocate existing branches or offices, he said.
The remaining five banks will be granted one of the preferential regulatory treatments, he said.
Lee said that the government had been strengthening measures to help SMEs obtain bank loans following the success of a policy implemented in July 2005 which facilitated NT$805.4 billion in bank loans to SMEs.
With the policy expiring in June this year, the FSC decided to extend it by encouraging banks to offer another NT$300 billion in loans.
Among the top performing banks that aided SMEs last year were the Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行), the National Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (中小企業協會), E. Sun Bank (玉山銀行) and Taiwan Cooperative Bank (合作金庫銀行).
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts