Chartis Taiwan Insurance Co chairman Mark Wei (魏寶生) resigned yesterday for personal reasons after the company posted a robust performance with its underwriting profits topping NT$15 million (US$471,500) in the first two months of this year.
Leslie Mouat, Chartis’ regional president of Southeast Asia, will take on the chairmanship, effective immediately, the insurance agency said, adding that it has also appointed former finance minister Lin Chuan (林全) as a director.
“Under Wei’s leadership, we not only managed to get through difficult times, but we also achieved a tremendous result in first-quarter operations this year,” Mouat told a media briefing yesterday.
The insurance company had a gross premium return of NT$79.6 million in the first two months, with a loss ratio of 35 percent, Chartis said, referring to total losses paid out in claims and adjustment expenses divided by total earned premiums.
Wei said he would take a break for a while before assuming a new position, without elaborating what it would be. However, he said he would continue to help Chartis with its business expansion.
Meanwhile, Chartis Taiwan general manager Jason Tsai (蔡漢凌) said that amid fierce competition in the local insurance market, the company was planning to offer customized property insurance solutions for customers with large assets in the second or third quarter.
“We’ll be the first property insurance company to offer such services in the nation,” Tsai said. “The new insurance coverage will be extended to properties such as personal jets, red wine, works of art and personal collections.”
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