Cathay Life Insurance Co (國泰人壽), the nation’s largest life insurer, has obtained permission from the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) to increase its overseas investment ceiling to 45 percent of working capital from the current 40 percent.
Cathay Life was the nation’s first financial firm to adopt a higher overseas investment ceiling against an unfavorable domestic investment environment where interest rates remain low and competition is intensifying.
“The commission has given the go-ahead to the company’s application to raise the investment cap” to gain better investment returns, Financial Supervisory Commission Secretary-General Lin Tung-liang (林棟樑) said by telephone yesterday.
Lin did not elaborate on Cathay Life’s case, but it is -expected that other local life insurers and financial firms will view Cathay’s progress as a good omen to help them enhance the efficiency of their fund utilization.
Yesterday’s approval came after the commission in August amended its regulations governing domestic insurance companies’ investments in Chinese securities as a way to help boost investment gains.
Cathay Life is an insurance unit of Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金控), the nation’s largest financial services provider by revenue. At its quarterly investors conference earlier this month, Cathay Financial said it would increase investment in China’s real estate and equities sector.
Separately, Cathay Financial said yesterday it had acquired all of the 43.14 million outstanding shares of Cathay Securities Investment Trust Co (國泰投信) from its life insurance arm and other investors, making the fund management unit its wholly owned subsidiary.
In a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange, Cathay Financial said it had purchased the Cathay Securities Investment Trust shares at NT$64.3 per share, or NT$2.77 billion in total.
Prior to the share transaction, Cathay Securities Investment Trust was 40 percent owned by Cathay Life, 3.75 percent owned by Cathay Venture Capital Corp (國泰創業投資) and the remaining shares were owned by seven other parties.
“The deal is expected to make Cathay Securities Investment Trust an asset management platform within the [Cathay] group, It will also offer the company a better position to tap into the asset management business in the Greater Chinese market,” Cathay Financial said in the filing.
The deal still needs to receive the FSC’s approval, the company said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CRYSTAL HSU
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the