Taiwanese banks could better tap into the Chinese market if Beijing were to waive the statutory three-year grace period and allow Taiwanese banks immediate access to yuan-related business, pundits said yesterday.
“The nation’s financial regulator has promised [to negotiate with its Chinese counterpart] to ease the grace period before Taiwanese banks are allowed to operate yuan-denominated business,” Wang Lee-rong (王儷容), director of the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research’s (中經院) Center for Economic Forecasting, told a seminar organized by the National Policy Foundation and Taiwan Competitiveness Forum.
This could help Taiwanese banks, which are already at a disadvantage given their late entry into the market, Wang said.
Should the three-year grace period be completely scrapped, “Taiwanese banks will greatly benefit and could grow into banking giants in China,” Hwang Dar-yeh (黃達業), a finance professor at National Taiwan University, said at the seminar.
Hwang agreed with Wang that the government should talk to Chinese authorities about raising the 20 percent ceiling on Taiwanese shareholding in Chinese commercial banks to 50 percent in special economic districts such as Tianjin City and Sichuan Province.
However, Chang Chun-shyoung (張春雄), a finance professor at Shih Chien University, expressed concern over granting reciprocal treatment to Chinese banks.
The entry of Chinese banks, some of which are much bigger than their Taiwanese counterparts, could pose a big challenge to an already overcrowded market, Chang said.
During his keynote speech, Vice Premier Paul Chiu (邱正雄) said that Taiwanese banks had the upper hand in developing corporate and consumer banking, laying a solid foundation for branching out into China and leveraging off a potential clientele of 50,000 China-based Taiwanese businesses there.
Chiu said that officials from both sides of the Strait are scheduled to meet next month to engage in negotiations on cross-strait financial cooperation as well as sign a financial memorandum of understanding before opening up their markets to each other.
If such an agreement were inked, it would usher in a new era in cross-strait financial exchanges, he said.
Sweeping policy changes under US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr are having a chilling effect on vaccine makers as anti-vaccine rhetoric has turned into concrete changes in inoculation schedules and recommendations, investors and executives said. The administration of US President Donald Trump has in the past year upended vaccine recommendations, with the country last month ending its longstanding guidance that all children receive inoculations against flu, hepatitis A and other diseases. The unprecedented changes have led to diminished vaccine usage, hurt the investment case for some biotechs, and created a drag that would likely dent revenues and
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
In the wake of strong global demand for AI applications, Taiwan’s export-oriented economy accelerated with the composite index of economic indicators flashing the first “red” light in December for one year, indicating the economy is in booming mode, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Moreover, the index of leading indicators, which gauges the potential state of the economy over the next six months, also moved higher in December amid growing optimism over the outlook, the NDC said. In December, the index of economic indicators rose one point from a month earlier to 38, at the lower end of the “red” light.
RSS