With net financial assets in Taiwan rising 8.4 percent annually to 97,850 euros (US$108,300) per capita last year, Taiwan overtook Japan for the first time and was the second-richest in Asia behind only Singapore, the Allianz Group’s global wealth report published on Thursday showed.
That was 1,540 euros higher than Japan’s net financial assets per capita of 96,310 euros, but still 2,520 euros lower than Singapore’s 100,370 euros, the report showed.
Although the number might seem too high given that gross national income per capita stands at NT$768,959 (US$24,821), according to data provided by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), Allianz Taiwan Life Insurance Co (安聯人壽) said the average was boosted by the financial investments of very rich people.
Financial assets include cash, bank deposits, gains from insurance companies and pension institutions, securities (shares, bonds and investment funds) and other income, Allianz Taiwan Life Insurance said.
Worldwide, Taiwan climbed four spots to fourth last year, its highest in the past decade, with the US leading with net financial assets of 184,410 euros, followed by Switzerland (173,840 euros) and Singapore, the report showed.
While global gross financial assets fell last year for the first time since the financial crisis in 2008 with a drop of 0.1 percent, Taiwanese households bucked the trend, with their financial assets advancing 5.1 percent year-on-year, the report found.
Their average insurance and pension incomes posted the strongest growth of 9.8 percent among all assets, compared with securities’ increase of 3.7 percent and bank deposits’ mild gain of 3.4 percent, the report said.
Savers worldwide have found themselves in a bind, due to the US-China trade dispute, tightening of monetary conditions and the normalization of monetary policy, the report said.
As the central bank has kept its key interest rates unchanged since September 2016, many local investors have given bank deposits the cold shoulder and turned to insurance policies for higher returns, Allianz Taiwan Life Insurance spokesman Kirk Cheng (鄭祥琨) said by telephone on Thursday.
That explains why Taiwan’s insurance penetration rate remains at nearly 20 percent, the highest in the world, Cheng said.
Allianz’s total premiums rose 19 percent annually last year, with half of them coming from interest-sensitive policies, which usually give policyholders higher returns, he said.
Taiwanese households reported an average liability growth of 4.5 percent, mainly driven by rising home prices, but their gross financial assets still outpaced their loans, the report 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],”
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts