Hua Nan Financial Holding Co (華南金控) is hoping to open its Shenzhen, China-based branch by the year’s end, while aggressively evaluating non-organic expansion opportunities in China, company executives said yesterday.
“We aim to provide better services to China-based Taiwanese businesses, especially small and medium-sized firms located in the Greater Pearl River Delta region via the platform facilitated by our Hong Kong branch and the soon-to-be-opened Shenzhen branch and our Macau branch,” company vice president David Cheng (鄭永春) told an investors’ conference yesterday.
The financial services provider is also aggressively evaluating the possibility of acquiring a stake in commercial banks in second-tier Chinese cities, while its securities investment trust arm would soon apply for a qualified foreign institutional investor account in China so as to be able buy shares, he added.
Looking ahead, the company has earmarked its goals, which include a 1 percent return on assets and a 15 percent return on equities, he said.
“We’ve recovered our growth momentum,” company president Ed Liu (劉茂賢) said.
Hua Nan also said its banking arm has limited exposure in lending and equity investments linked to four European countries that are causing concern — Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain.
Hua Nan Commercial Bank (華南銀行) has granted a syndicated loan, which accounts for 0.06 percent of its total lending, to a publicly-traded company located in one of those countries, executive vice president York Lai (賴明佑) told the investors’ conference, adding that there were no signs the loan would turn sour.
It had also booked an exposure to an equity investment issued by a major bank in the region that accounts for 0.07 percent of the Taiwanese bank’s total equity investments, he added.
The company yesterday posted NT$1.3 billion (US$40.4 million) in net income for the first quarter of this year, a 26 percent decline year-on-year.
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