Mercuries Life Insurance Co (三商美邦人壽保險) on Wednesday filed applications with the Taiwan Stock Exchange for a plan to trade its shares on the main bourse by the end of the year.
The insurer, established in 1993, has traded its shares on the smaller Emerging Stock Market since February.
Mercuries Life said in the prospectus that it plans to issue 22.22 million new shares, 10 percent of which will be for subscription by employees.
The issue price has been set tentatively at NT$18, in a bid to raise about NT$400 million (US$13 million) as working capital and to improve the company’s financial structure, the prospectus said.
Mercuries Life reported NT$503.9 billion in total assets last year, gross premiums of NT$95 billion and first-year premiums at NT$32.8 billion.
Net profit was NT$832.22 million, or earnings per share of NT$0.78, last year, compared with a net profit of NT$309.67 million, or NT$0.31 per share, in 2010.
In the first six months of this year, its net profit totaled NT$663.93 million, or NT$0.62 per share, the company said.
Mercuries Life said the funds raised from the main bourse listing are expected to boost its risk-based capital (RBC) ratio by about 5 percentage points.
The company’s RBC ratio stood at 220.3 percent at the end of June, which is higher than the regulatory requirement of 200 percent but down from 226.1 percent from the end of last year, as its financial health has been affected by the volatility of the global financial markets amid lingering debt problems in the eurozone.
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