The US-China trade tensions have had a limited impact on SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控) as the company has diversified its loan portfolio in China, president Stanley Chu (朱士廷) said yesterday.
SinoPac’s exposure to China, totaling NT$86.39 billion (US$2.74 billion) as of the end of March, accounted for 72 percent of its net worth and was lower than most of its local peers, Chu told an investors’ conference in Taipei.
The Financial Supervisory Commission has demanded that financial firms with exposure to China exceeding 80 percent of their net worth pay more attention to credit extension.
“The company’s exposure to China surpassed 80 percent a few years ago, but we began reducing it from the second half of last year due to the escalating trade tensions,” Chu said.
As SinoPac’s exposure is spread across China’s top 20 industries, the company is not worried that the headwinds for a single industry would hurt its business, Chu said.
Its exposure to the US was NT$34.6 billion as of the end of March, which was not high, he said.
SinoPac expects the latest round of US tariffs — 25 percent on US$200 billion worth of Chinese goods effective from May 10 — would trim 0.15 percentage points off Taiwan’s economic growth for this year.
A full-blown trade war would hurt Taiwan, eroding GDP growth by 0.63 percentage points this year, Chu said.
Washington’s plan to impose another 25 percent tariff on US$300 billion of Chinese goods would be a bigger threat for Taiwan, SinoPac chief economist Jack Huang (黃蔭基) said.
Companies that are involved in China’s supply chains, including petrochemicals, machinery and networking communications, would be the ones most affected, Huang said.
The New Taiwan dollar fell NT$0.017 to close at NT$31.547 against the US dollar in Taipei trading yesterday, amid a sell-off of local shares by foreign institutional investors, Huang said, adding that he expects the greenback to weaken in the second half of the year.
SinoPac reported a net profit of NT$3.72 billion for the first quarter, up 41 percent year-on-year, bolstered by contributions from fee income, company data showed.
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
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