Taiwan Life Insurance Co (台灣人壽保險) is to stop selling insurance savings plans that promise high returns within one year, company president Tony Chuang (莊中慶) said on Thursday.
The move came after the Financial Supervisory Commission on Wednesday announced that it would enhance reviews of insurance savings plans and lower the ratio of death benefits, which would discourage insurers from selling savings plans.
“The commission’s new regulations will affect insurers’ marketing strategies, but we agree that insurance is not intended for wealth management,” Chuang told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei.
Taiwan Life stopped selling single-premium insurance savings plans in July last year.
Chuang said the products had forced the company to prepare a larger special reserve after adopting the International Financial Reporting Standards 17.
The insurer is to first stop sales of savings plans that are subject to a six-year payment requirement and would gradually suspend the sale of other plans that promise high returns, Chuang said.
Taiwan Life is not worried about the effect on its premium income after the plans are ended, he said.
The company would set a long-term plan to achieve stable profit growth, Chuang added.
The company’s equity-to-asset ratio has climbed to 5 percent after it injected NT$10 billion (US$317.26 million) in new funds last month, he said.
Insurers whose equity-to-asset ratio is lower than 3 percent must increase their capital, the commission said on Wednesday.
Separately, local life insurers reported foreign-exchange gains of NT$66.7 billion in the first four months of the year.
However, those gains were offset by cumulative hedging losses of NT$135.8 billion over the period, which saw combined pretax profit plunge 10.9 percent annually to NT$47.6 billion, Insurance Bureau data showed.
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