The president of one of China’s “big four” state-owned banks has resigned for personal reasons, the company said, after reports he had been taken away in a corruption investigation, as probes widen in the nation’s financial sector.
Zhang Yun (張雲) had stepped down from Agricultural Bank of China (中國農業銀行), the bank said in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, where it is listed.
The announcement came a month after China’s news portal Sina reported that Zhang, 56, had been taken away for questioning.
Meanwhile, China’s biggest brokerage, Citic Securities (中信證券), on Sunday told the Hong Kong exchange it had lost contact with two members of its executive committee — Chen Jun (陳軍) and Yan Jianlin (閆建霖) — and that they might be assisting an investigation.
However, some other employees of the brokerage had returned to work after being summoned for questioning by police, it added.
Chinese authorities have launched a series of investigations into the financial sector after a debt-fueled stock market bubble — encouraged by authorities — burst in the summer in a rout that wiped out trillions of dollars of market capitalizations.
Citic Securities said two weeks ago that the company was being probed by the market regulator, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, following police investigations into several company executives for insider trading and leaking inside information.
Agricultural Bank closed down 0.91 percent in Shanghai yesterday, but added 0.34 percent in Hong Kong.
Citic Securities dropped 1.86 percent in Shanghai and 0.33 percent in Hong Kong.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to