Shin Kong Life Insurance Co (新光人壽), the main subsidiary and the biggest profit source of Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控), plans to auction its office building in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) next month in a bid to revitalize assets, bidding organizer Jones Lang LaSalle said yesterday.
The announcement came after the insurer’s board on Tuesday authorized company chairman Eugene Wu (吳東進) to dispose of the 10-year-old office building and the adjacent A8 building of Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store (新光三越百貨).
The insurer set a floor price of NT$9 billion (US$277.2 million) for the office building, which features 7,445 ping (24,612m2) of floor space in 10 above-ground levels and five basement levels with 118 parking spaces, Jones Lang LaSalle investment manager Sherry Wu (吳瑤華) said by telephone.
That translates into NT$2.7 million per ping for the ground floor and NT$1.35 million per ping for other floors, in line with market rates, Wu added.
“We are confident in securing buyers for the building on the auction set for Oct. 15 given its location,” Wu said.
At issue is permanent ownership of an upscale building on a 849.69 ping plot that is 98 percent occupied by financial companies, law firms and other corporate tenants, she said.
Domestic life insurance companies will have difficulty meeting the minimum yield requirement of 2.875 percent if the building is not intended for self-occupancy, Wu said.
Companies from other sectors are not subjected to the yield requirements.
Shin Kong Financial earlier this week said net profit last month fell 11.2 percent from June to NT$4.93 billion due to a loss of NT$13.94 billion based on mark-to-market accounting.
In the first seven months of the year, the firm’s net profit grew 44.9 percent year-on-year to NT$70.83 billion, or NT$0.68 per share.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
STILL UNCLEAR: Several aspects of the policy still need to be clarified, such as whether the exemptions would expand to related products, PwC Taiwan warned The TAIEX surged yesterday, led by gains in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), after US President Donald Trump announced a sweeping 100 percent tariff on imported semiconductors — while exempting companies operating or building plants in the US, which includes TSMC. The benchmark index jumped 556.41 points, or 2.37 percent, to close at 24,003.77, breaching the 24,000-point level and hitting its highest close this year, Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) data showed. TSMC rose NT$55, or 4.89 percent, to close at a record NT$1,180, as the company is already investing heavily in a multibillion-dollar plant in Arizona that led investors to assume
RSS