The board of Taishin International Bank (台新銀行), the nation’s third-largest credit card issuer, yesterday approved plans to sign a cooperation agreement with China’s leading online payment service provider, Alipay (支付寶), and Chinese credit card network UnionPay Co (中國銀聯).
The plans, which still need regulatory approval, would enable the lender to tap cross-strait e-commerce business opportunities as Taiwan and China deepen trade ties, the bank said in a statement.
Taishin Bank, the flagship subsidiary of Taishin Financial Holdings Co (台新金控), will become the second Taiwanese lender to partner with Alipay after E. Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行).
Alipay commands a 49 percent share of China’s online shopping market, with 650 million registered users as of Dec. 31 last year. The third-party payment company processes about 50 percent of online shopping transactions for China’s largest shopping and auction Web site, Taobao Mall (淘寶網), which was founded by Alibaba Group (阿里巴巴集團) in 2003.
Chinese spent NT$3.6 trillion (US$121.6 billion) on online shopping last year, E. Sun Bank said earlier this month when announcing its partnership with Alipay.
Shanghai-based UnionPay is popular with Chinese tourists during their trips to Taiwan, sparing them the trouble of carrying around cash.
Taishin did not supply details of the agreement or an estimate of revenue growth linked to the planned joint venture.
Meanwhile, China Life Insurance Co (中國人) said yesterday its earnings would climb higher this year after net income hit a record high of NT$4.21 billion last year.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by