The legislature’s recent rejection of financial improvement plans for Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC, 高鐵) will have a limited impact on local financial institutions and the impact will be limited mainly to equity investments, Moody’s Investors Service said yesterday.
“We expect that investors will take losses on their holdings of preferred shares and common shares,” but that should not cause serious damage to banks with exposure to THSRC, Moody’s analyst Ginger Kao (高玟君) said in a report.
Last week, the legislature’s Transportation Committee turned down the financial improvement plan submitted by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications for THSRC.
THSRC will be put under government receivership if it declares bankruptcy, the ministry said. THSRC is a private company under a build-operate-transfer scheme in which it receives concessions from the government.
Without the restructuring plan, THSRC could declare bankruptcy as early as March this year, when it would face redemption demands from its preferred-share investors totaling NT$53.3 billion (US$1.68 billion), including principal and interest, backed by court orders.
Several Taiwanese banks have direct exposure to THSRC that includes loans, guarantees and equity investments. As of June 30 last year, THSRC had borrowed NT$365 billion from eight state-controlled banks, mainly through a syndicated loan in 2010, which accounted for 1.8 percent to 3.9 percent of individual banks’ total loans, Moody’s said.
Some banks that have holdings in THSRC in the form of preferred shares have not yet set aside reserves for the potential credit impairments, with potential losses likely to amount to between 2 percent and 18 percent of their pre-provision income as of June 30 last year under a full write-down scenario, Kao said.
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