Mercuries Life Insurance Co (三商美邦人壽保險) is looking to achieve gross premiums of more than NT$100 billion (US$3.3 billion) this year and raise its total assets above NT$1 trillion in five years, senior executives said yesterday.
The outlook is somewhat conservative considering the NT$2.45 billion net income the insurer posted last year, which was 59.4 percent up from the previous year.
“It is difficult to achieve an equally aggressive showing [in terms of profitability] this year as the stop-sale effect fades away and insurance policies become more expensive,” Mercuries Life chief financial officer Winston Yang (楊棋材) said.
Yang attributed this to the Financial Supervisory Commission lowering assumed interest rates, limiting the yield leeway for insurance policies.
Mercuries Life is seeking to keep first-year premiums unchanged this year from last year and improve its financial proficiency by raising the contribution of recurring income to the company’s break-even point, or yielding an interest rate of 3 percent, Yang said.
Currently, recurring income accounts for 80 percent of the company’s net investment income, yielding an average interest rate of 2.9 percent, he said.
The US tapering of its quantitative easing (QE) is good for the sector’s business operating environment in the long run, but may weigh on bond prices in the short term, communications official Kao Chih-chiang (高志強) said.
Taiwan’s sixth-largest insurer by assets is determined to increase its asset size from NT$700 billion at present to above NT$1 trillion in five years, chief executive officer Roy Meng (孟嘉仁) said.
A member of Mercuries & Associates Ltd (三商行), which owns 1,000 restaurants, grocery shops, shoe stores and other businesses, the insurer is to set up a marketing office this year to integrate 800,000 customers and improve sales channels, Meng said.
Mercuries Life has no interest in joining a financial holding company, though it is supportive of consolidation among the nation’s financial institutions, Meng said.
The company plans to increase its sales staff from 15,000 to 16,000 this year to deepen its presence in the domestic market, Meng said.
Shares in Mercuries Life rose 0.51 percent to NT$19.7 yesterday in Taipei trading, more than the TAIEX’s 0.07 percent rise, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained