Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控) said on Tuesday it had signed a private placement deal with Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Co to sell NT$7.96 billion (US$240.6 million) in equities to the Japanese life insurer.
In a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange, Shin Kong Financial said it would sell NT$6.3 billion in common shares to Dai-ichi Mutual Life to boost the Taiwanese firm’s capital.
The filing said Shin Kong Financial would also sell NT$1.65 billion in preferred shares in its subsidiary Shin Kong Life Insurance Co (新光人壽) to Dai-ichi Mutual Life to help strength the local life insurer’s financial structure.
As of the end of September, Shin Kong Financial was the nation’s sixth-largest financial services provider in terms of assets, Financial Supervisory Commission data showed.
The company said in late October that the capital injection from its Japanese shareholder would likely boost Shin Kong Life’s ratio of risk-based capital (RBC) to 250 percent, higher than the regulatory requirement of 200 percent.
RBC is a measurement of an insurer’s or a financial institution’s capital strength.
Upon completion of the deal, Dai-ichi Mutual Life’s shareholding in Shin Kong Financial will increase to 14.9 percent from 5.99 percent, Shin Kong Financial said in October.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
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