The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) said yesterday it is mulling easing regulatory measures to promote the offshore yuan bond market.
The watchdog’s response came after pleas for the commission to adopt a two-track supervision mechanism allowing institutional investors to take on more risk, as they have more resources and better understand the market.
By contrast, individual players need more protection given their lack of professional knowhow, foreign trade groups have said.
The commission said it is receptive to loosening credit rating requirements so that more companies are qualified to issue Formosa bonds (offshore yuan bonds).
The regulator added it would also study measures to attract more domestic and overseas issuers, and streamline review procedures to cut issuance costs and boost the number of transactions.
Separately, the commission approved plans by Shin Kong Commercial Bank (新光銀行), the banking arm of Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控), to set up a branch in the Vietnamese province of Binh Duong, as the lender seeks to deepen its presence in the emerging market.
Shin Kong Bank has a representative office in Ho Chi Minh City.
The lender aims to serve Taiwanese companies operating in Vietnam, the commission said.
The regulator also gave China Construction Bank Corp (中國建設銀行) business permissions for its Taipei branch, including handling deposits, savings, lending and trade financing.
China Construction is the world’s sixth-largest bank in terms of tier-one capital and it ranks 12th by assets, the commission said. The bank’s capital adequacy ratio rose to 14.32 percent last year from 13.68 percent in 2011, helped by a 40 billion yuan (US$6.44 billion) bond 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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts