E.Sun Financial Holding Co (玉山金控) yesterday posted a 10.5 percent year-on-year jump in net profit to NT$10.22 billion (US$324.58 million) for the first six months of this year on the back of growth in net fee income and lending to returning Taiwanese companies.
Earnings per share climbed to NT$0.94, compared with NT$0.91 a year earlier, company data showed.
E.Sun Bank (玉山銀行) contributed NT$10.14 billion, or 96.7 percent, of the conglomerate’s profit, while securities and venture capital units made up the remaining 3.3 percent, E.Sun Financial said.
“This was the first time that E.Sun Financial and E.Sun Bank saw net profit surpass NT$10 billion for the January-to-June period,” E.Sun Financial president Joseph Huang (黃男州) told an investors’ conference in Taipei.
The company is upbeat that the momentum would continue in the second half of the year, as net profit last month rose 11 percent to NT$1.83 billion, or earnings per share of NT$1.11, Huang said.
In the first half of the year, revenue advanced 7 percent to NT$26.7 billion thanks to a 3.1 percent increase in net fee income to NT$8.66 billion, the highest for the period in the company’s history, company data showed.
Net fee income generated from the credit card business jumped 25 percent year-on-year, the data showed.
Huang attributed the increase to E.Sun Bank’s Pi mobile wallet app, which helped increase credit card spending by 19.1 percent to NT$205 billion and boost per card spending to a record-high NT$9,392 per month.
The bank’s total lending jumped 9.7 percent to NT$1.38 trillion in the first half thanks to a 14 percent surge in large corporate loans to NT$335.9 billion, company data showed.
“The bank has taken a decent share of the loan market,” Huang said.
However, he declined to reveal how much the bank had lent to local firms relocating manufacturing back to Taiwan from abroad.
Net interest income (including interest income from bond investments) gained 4.5 percent, as the bank was able to maintain its net interest margin at 1.36 percent, Huang said.
A falling Chinese yuan would have limited effects on the bank’s business, as most of its clients have chosen the US dollar for their foreign currency deposits and the US Federal Reserve late last year hiked its interest rates, E.Sun Financial chief financial officer Magi Chen (陳美滿) said.
On Monday, the yuan fell to less than 7 yuan per US dollar, but the Chinese currency is likely to rebound in the near term, as China still wants to continue negotiating with the US and solve their trade disputes, Chen said.
E.Sun Bank, which was the issuer of a credit card used to purchase a massive quantity of duty-free cigarettes during a presidential trip overseas last month that sparked a smuggling scandal, refused to comment on the transaction, citing the Money Laundering Control Act (洗錢防制法).
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