State-owned Taiwan Financial Holdings Co (台灣金控) aims to strengthen wealth management and syndicated loan operations this year to boost profits and differentiate itself from its domestic peers, company chairperson Susan Chang (張秀蓮) said yesterday.
Too much overlapping business tops the challenges for lenders, as stiff competition has driven borrowing costs so low that it has squeezed banks’ profits, Chang said.
“We will build our niche market around the provision of wealth management services and syndicated loans,” Chang told the media at a briefing about the group’s development plans for the year.
Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行), the group’s main source of income, will seek to maintain its leadership in sales of gold investment products and extend its corporate services to small and medium-sized companies, Su said.
Taiwan Financial, the country’s second-largest financial services provider by assets, posted NT$3.94 billion (US$133.21 million) in net profit last year, 11 percent higher than its target of NT$3.55 billion, company data showed.
Its earnings would have hit NT$12.9 billion if it did not have to set aside about NT$9 billion to fund preferential interest payments on savings for government employees and public school teachers, the report said.
Chang, who also heads the nation’s bankers association, pressed the government ahead of a meeting with the Financial Supervisary Commission (FSC) to allow banks greater flexibility in Chinese yuan operations.
Taiwanese banks may not take yuan deposits or provide yuan remittances or purchases of yuan-denominated securities, although such services are available at their offshore banking units for corporate customers, Chang said.
The FSC plans to meet chief executives from all 16 domestic financial holding companies today.
Chang said she would ask the FSC to extend yuan-denominated services to domestic banking units.
The banker further expressed the wish that the commission would help negotiate easier terms for Taiwanese banks to operate yuan businesses in China.
“We hope China would allow Taiwanese lenders to offer yuan banking services without having to wait for one year after entering the system there,” Chang said.
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