Several domestic bankers yesterday urged the financial regulator to ease its newly announced regulations on China-bound investments so they could accelerate their expansion into China, while others hoped for more preferential terms in upcoming economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) negotiations.
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) announced on Tuesday that Taiwanese banks would be allowed to take a stake of less than 50 percent in Chinese banks. In the future they may be given the go-ahead to set up 100 percent-owned subsidiaries there.
However, Chinatrust Financial Holding Co (中信金) disagreed with the commission’s reasoning.
“If we are not allowed to take up a more than 50 percent controlling stake in a Chinese bank, we will meet difficulty in delivering value-added [financial] services there, which will be unfavorable for our expansion into China,” Albert Cheung (張儉生), an executive vice president at Chinatrust Financial Holding Co’s (中信金) China business development office, told reporters on the sidelines of a regulation briefing organized by the commission’s banking bureau yesterday.
He also called the 50 percent cap redundant because the regulator has said a bank’s China-bound investment may not exceed 15 percent of a bank’s net worth, or 10 percent of its parent holding company’s net worth.
A representative from Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控), who declined to be identified, seemed upset when he was told that his company would not be allowed to take up a stake in any Chinese banks beyond Xiamen Bank (廈門銀行), earlier known as Xiamen City Commercial Bank.
Banking bureau section chief Chen Jui-jung (陳瑞榮) told the briefing: “The new regulation is retroactive, which means Fubon Financial has used up its quota in taking up a stake in one Chinese bank.”
However, the Fubon Financial banker argued, “the new regulation shouldn’t be retroactive since we branched out into China at a different time.”
In early 2008, Fubon Financial outpaced local peers to acquire a 19.9 percent stake in Xiamen Bank for US$34 million via its Hong Kong subsidiary.
The company recently said that it planned to increase its stake in Xiamen Bank to 50 percent.
The briefing was attended by several bank executives and representatives including SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控) president Mckinney Tsai (蔡友才), Taishin Financial Holding Co (台新金控) president Lin Keh-hsiao (林克孝) and E.Sun Financial Holding Co (玉山金控) president Joseph Huang (黃男州).
Huang refused to comment on the latest regulation, but he said that he looks forward to the cancelation of a two-year waiting period — to be addressed in upcoming ECFA negotiations — so that the company’s newly launched representative office in Dongguan, Guangzhou Province, could be immediately upgraded into a branch.
In his opening speech yesterday, Kuei Hsien-nung (桂先農), director-general of the banking bureau, said the regulator aims to open up the local market “in a progressive manner.”
However, he added that his bureau may begin to accept applications on Monday when FSC Chairman Sean Chen (陳冲) completes a question-and-answer session in the legislature.
To act on the new policy, Taiwan Cooperative Bank (合作金庫銀行) chairman Liu Deng-cheng (劉燈城) yesterday told the Chinese-language United Evening News that his bank aims to be the first to submit its China expansion plan to the commission for review on Monday.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained