Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) Chairman Sean Chen (陳冲) yesterday denied the commission had plans to recapitalize the defunct Financial Restructuring Fund with more than NT$1 trillion (US$29.3 billion) to help stabilize the nation’s financial sector.
“I’ve never heard of such a plan, let alone a NT$1 trillion fund,” Chen told reporters yesterday after giving a speech at the Taiwan Corporate Governance Association in Taipei.
He said the commission had explored some measures to support the financial sector should liquidity or credit problems arise amid the global financial crisis.
So far, however, the domestic financial sector seemed well capitalized and resilient, with a record-high 70 percent coverage ratio, which showed that a government bailout fund was unnecessary, he said.
Chen had said the commission was mulling measures to set up a stabilization fund to buy bank shares.
Such a plan, however, was still being studied, Shiau Chang-ruey (蕭長瑞), deputy director-general of the commission’s banking bureau, said earlier.
In his speech, Chen said the nation’s stock market had stabilized and outperformed global markets in the past three months with a rise of 8.28 percent — second only to the Shanghai benchmark’s 18.26 percent — while major markets continued their downward trend.
He said foreign share investors had mostly been buyers of local shares since early this month, reversing deleveraging moves in previous months. He did not elaborate.
The commission was also “cautiously optimistic” that 192 companies would be able to repay their corporate bonds — which could mature this year — with a total value estimated at NT$268.7 billion , Chen said, citing a survey of the companies.
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],”
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
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