The nation’s 12 credit and cash card issuers yesterday reached a consensus on the Financial Supervision Commission’s (FSC) call to lower the interest rate on revolving credit by a minimum of 1.25 percentage points, the commission said yesterday.
The proposal to trim interest rates on revolving credit will apply to cardholders who have paid their bills regularly and who have not violated any credit rule, the commission said in a statement.
The commission estimated that the proposal would benefit 8 million cardholders, 1.3 million of whom have activated their revolving credit and have been paying an average 14 percent revolving interest rate.
The rate, however, could climb up to 20 percent.
The banks have agreed to complete their billing system before Feb. 15, the commission said.
The 12 banks include Citibank Taiwan Ltd (台灣花旗), Chinatrust Commercial Bank (中國信託銀行), E. Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行), Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) and ABN AMRO Bank.
In addition, the banks agreed to review cardholders’ credit risk on a quarterly basis, instead of on a bi-annual basis as was done previously, to reflect the series of benchmark rate cuts by the central bank in recent months.
As of the end of November, the outstanding amount of revolving credit totaled NT$258 billion, down 2.6 percent from October, the commission’s data showed.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by