Taishin Financial Holding Co (台新金控) yesterday vowed 15 percent growth in the number of new clients to 500,000 this year along with a 5 percent to 10 percent growth from loan businesses.
Taishin Financial, the nation’s fifth-largest financial service provider by assets, yesterday further heralded its improved bank profitability after its ratio of pre-tax income versus total assets jumped to the second-highest among 13 of its peers in the first quarter, up from 12th place in 2006, company chief operating officer Greg Gibb told an investors’ conference yesterday.
“As a result of restructuring efforts in the past two to three years, we’ve begun to see a stable profitability,” he said, adding that Taishin Financial also aims to become a leader in providing mobile banking services to smartphone users.
Among its peers, the company further reported the third-highest pre-tax earning per share of NT$0.52 as of last month, next to Fubon Financial Holding Co’s (富邦金控) NT$0.88 per share and Chinatrust Financial Holding Co’s (中信金控) NT$0.54 per share. In the first quarter, the company reported a rosy 195 percent year-on-year growth to NT$2.3 billion (US$72.1 million) in net profit, or NT$0.36 per share, on lowered funding costs and sustained improvements in both net interest incomes and fee incomes.
Looking ahead, an analyst with Concord Securities Co (康和證券), who requested anonymity, said he believes Taishin Financial should be able to continue its earning growth.
The market consensus is that its full-year earning should level between NT$7 billion and NT$9 billion, from last year’s NT$8.2 billion, the analyst said.
However, he is less optimistic for Taishin Financial to raise the number of its new clients to 500,000 after the integration of Chinfon Commercial Bank’s (慶豐銀行) credit card business in March brought in 260,000 new customers. Having re-launched on Monday, Taishin Financial’s securities brokerage arm will niche on investment banking and e-trading businesses by leveraging its bank distribution network, Gibb said.
Expressing a conservative view about the local economy’s prospects, company president Lin Keh-hsiao (林克孝) yesterday said that he expects the central bank to refrain from hiking interest rates this year.
Amid a weakening euro, Lin further expressed concerns over the competitiveness of the nation’s Europe-bound exports in the foreseeable future.
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