Citibank Taiwan Ltd (台灣花旗) is expected to post better profits this year and plans to hire several hundred full-time employees, the bank’s new chairman, Victor Kuan (管國霖), said yesterday.
“The bank had NT$6.8 billion [US$211.2 million] in profits in the first five months of this year, [compared with] last year’s profit of NT$13 billion for the full year,” Kuan said as he took over as bank chairman from Morris Li (利明獻), who is slated to take over as president of Guangdong Development Bank (廣東發展銀行).
Following its acquisition of the Taipei-based Bank of Overseas Chinese (華僑銀行) in August, Citibank Taiwan will continue to invest in the local market, Kuan said, adding that major strategic alliances and investments in innovative financial services would be announced in the third quarter of this year.
“Our commitment to putting clients first and cultivating Taiwan’s market has never changed,” Kuan said.
In addition, Kuan said that Citibank Taiwan was set to expand its payrolls from the current number of about 5,000 employees by between 300 and 400 people this year, including professionals in corporate finance, credit card salespeople and wealth management specialists.
In related news, state-run Mega Financial Holding Co (兆豐金控), Hua Nan Financial Holding Co (華南金控) and First Financial Holding Co (第一金控) yesterday also bid farewell to their former chairmen as they welcomed new heads.
Mega Financial Holding’s new chairman, Mckinney Tsai (蔡友才), told a handover ceremony that his company was set to upgrade its representative office in Suzhou, China, to a branch office after it completes one year of operation there on Oct. 28.
Wang Rong-jou (王榮周) of Hwa Nan Financial also said that tapping the Chinese market would be his company’s first priority this year, while First Financial’s new chairman Joseph Tsai (蔡慶年) said that his company would not rule out buying shares in third and fourth-tier Chinese banks in the 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],”
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