The owner of Russia’s 12th-biggest lender by assets, B&N Bank, has asked the central bank for a bailout, the regulator said yesterday, three weeks after another leading Russian bank had to be rescued.
The central bank, in an e-mailed statement, said B&N Bank’s owners, a holding group controlled by tycoon Mikhail Gutseriev and his family, had asked for financial rehabilitation via the central bank’s Fund for Banking Sector Consolidation.
That is the same mechanism that is being used to rescue Otkritie FC Bank, Russia’s largest private lender, after it late last month said it had a hole in its balance sheet and needed help.
The central bank said that it would make a decision on the request from B&N Bank in the near future.
Safmar, the holding group that controls B&N Bank, declined to comment.
A combination of factors has been putting pressure on some Russian banks.
They were already under stress from an economic slowdown, made worse by Western sanctions, and have seen their share of bad debts rise over the past three years.
For some, their financial health worsened after the central bank, as part of a drive to clean up the banking sector, forced banks to make more rigorous provisions for non-performing loans. At the same time, banks’ margins have tightened because interest rates have come down.
Officials and banking sector analysts say they do not see a risk of a systemic banking crisis. They say that state-controlled banks, which account for more than half of assets in the sector, have strong capital positions and so are not in danger.
B&N Bank, founded in 1993, is part of a conglomerate controlled by Gutseriev and his family that includes oil companies, a property development portfolio and an electronics retailer.
B&N Bank embarked on an expansion strategy after 2010, taking over smaller lenders including Moskomprivatbank, Rost Bank, SKA-Bank and others. It is not on the central bank’s list of systemically important lenders.
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
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
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