INSURANCE
Fubon opens doors in HK
Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控) yesterday announced that Fubon Life Insurance (Hong Kong) (香港富邦人壽), its wholly owned subsidiary, has opened its doors, representing an additional foothold in the Asian market for the company. Aiming to become a regional insurance carrier, Fubon Financial first expanded into Vietnam’s life insurance market in 2011, followed by South Korea last year. Despite its status as a mature market, Hong Kong’s life insurance sector last year recorded double-digit growth in annual premium collections, the company said.
AUTOMAKERS
Toyota plants unharmed
Hotai Motor Co (和泰汽車), which distributes Toyota and Lexus models in Taiwan, on Sunday said that the series of earthquakes that hit Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture on Kyushu island did not affect Toyota’s plants according to preliminary findings, but added that some car parts would possibly encounter supply shortages. Hotai’s comments came after Toyota’s Japanese automotive factories shut down from yesterday to Saturday due to the earthquakes. Hotai also said that a shipment of Lexus cars from Kyushu arrived in Taipei before the earthquakes hit, adding that the import of the vehicles would not be affected in the short term. Another distributor, Yulon Motor Co (裕隆), yesterday said that there was no risk to the company’s supply of Nissan cars, adding that inventories are within safety margins. China Motor Corp (中華汽車) said the plants producing Mitsubishi cars are located in Nagoya and should be unharmed.
SEMICONDUCTORS
SPIL scraps capital-raising
Siliconware Precision Industries Co (SPIL, 矽品精密), the world’s No. 3 chip tester and packager, yesterday said that its board has decided to scrap its proposal to raise the authorized share capital by 10 percent in a bid to enhance financial flexibility and fund growth. SPIL said the move aims to allow the annual shareholder’s meeting to proceed smoothly. The meeting is scheduled to be held on May 16. There is no urgency to expand the authorized share capital, the company said. The board originally proposed to expand the authorized share capital from 3.6 billion to 3.96 billion shares via amending the company’s articles of incorporation.
INVESTMENT
Major players decline
The number of major players actively trading on Taiwan’s stock market in the first quarter of this year fell to a seven-year low, statistics compiled by the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) showed yesterday. During the January-to-March period, 530 major players participated in the local market, down from 547 during the same period last year and the lowest in seven years, FSC data showed. A “major player” is defined in Taiwan as an investor who trades at least NT$500 million (US15.43 million) in shares in a single quarter and their numbers serve as an important indicator of investor confidence in the nation’s capital markets. The number of major market players has been on the decline over the past four years, because of a capital gains tax on stock gains targeting big investors that was never actually implemented, analysts said. Speaking on the sidelines of a legislative hearing, FSC Vice Chairman Huang Tien-mu (黃天牧) said the annulment of the capital gains tax took effect at the beginning of this year, so many major market players had yet to divert their funds back to Taiwan.
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],”
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
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