SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控) will book an additional US$44.66 million in provisions to write off its banking unit’s losses related to structured note products sold by the Private Equity Management Group (PEM Group), which was seized by the US government in April.
In a stock exchange filing on Friday, SinoPac Financial said its board agreed to use the additional provisions to cover losses it could incur from the buyback of PEM Group products that Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行) has sold to customers.
SinoPac Financial said the amount was calculated based on the estimated asset value provided by a US court-appointed receiver in charge of late Taiwanese-American financier Danny Pang’s (彭日成) companies.
Pang, 42, died on Sept. 12 in California. Before his death, he was under investigation over allegations he had cheated investors via a Ponzi scheme.
ENSNARED
Bank SinoPac is among six local banks that marketed more than US$700 million in PEM Group products to 16,000 Taiwanese investors in the past few years, Financial Supervisory Commission Chairman Sean Chen (陳冲) said on April 29.
Other banks are Cosmos Bank (萬泰銀行), EnTie Commercial Bank (安泰銀行), Hua Nan Commercial Bank (華南銀行), Standard Chartered Bank (Taiwan) Ltd (渣打銀行) and Taichung Commercial Bank (台中商銀).
Bank SinoPac sold three types of PEM Group products to its customers for a total of US$146 million.
On June 26, the bank’s board agreed to buy back PEM Group products from customers before reaching their maturities and tentatively decided to exercise US$23 million as writeoffs.
Including the newly added US$44.66 million in provisions, Bank SinoPac has so far booked US$67.66 million in PEM Group writeoffs this year, or 46.3 percent of its total exposure.
As Bank SinoPac represents a core unit of the SinoPac Financial, accounting for about 70 percent of the group’s total recurring profits, the increased PEM Group writeoffs are expected to hurt the financial services provider’s whole-year profitability.
UNCERTAINTY
With uncertainties over SinoPac group’s profitability, the three major international ratings agencies — Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings — in June and July gave a negative outlook for SinoPac Financial and Bank SinoPac’s credit ratings.
Last month, SinoPac Financial reported NT$1.15 billion (US$35.65 million) in net profit, or NT$0.17 earnings per share. Between January and last month, it posted NT$2.47 billion in net profit, or NT$0.35 per share.
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
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