Taiwan Ratings Corp (中華信評), the local arm of Standard & Poor’s, yesterday placed China Development Financial Holdings Co (中華開發) on its “credit watch” with negative implications, saying the firm’s plan to buy KGI Securities Co (凱基證券) may weaken its capital strength.
The conglomerate on Thursday last week offered to buy KGI Securities at a 33 percent premium — with each KGI share to be exchanged for 1.2 China Development Financial shares plus NT$5 in cash.
The deal is sized at between NT$27.37 billion (US$92.57 million) and NT$54.63 billion since China Development Financial said it wanted to acquire between 50.1 percent and 100 percent of KGI shares to make it a fully owned subsidiary.
Besides worries about China Development Financial’s capital strength, Taiwan Ratings said its credit watch also reflected concerns that the conglomerate’s significantly enlarged securities business might not remain on par with its credit profile after the buyout.
The agency said it was also uncertain if the buyer could maintain its current overall credit profile after consolidating KGI Securities, which likely has a weaker credit profile.
China Development Financial said last week it planned to finance the buyout with proceeds from a NT$16 billion capital reduction plan at its banking unit, China Development Industrial Bank (中華開發工銀), as well as new share issue.
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