To circumvent government restrictions, the Tsai family, the majority shareholder of Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大), yesterday said it planned to resume a suspended bid to acquire Taiwan’s biggest cable system operator Kbro Co (凱擘) from private equity fund Carlyle Group by forming an investment firm of its own.
The latest development came after efforts of the nation’s No. 2 telecom operator to expand its cable TV business through the acquisition were prevented by rules saying that government agencies are barred from investing in any media firms.
If Taiwan Mobile’s proposal to buy Kbro was approved under current conditions, the Taipei City Government would be indirectly involved in the cable TV business as it holds a 15 percent stake in Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控), the parent company of Taiwan Mobile.
“We have ended talks with Carlyle because of the restrictions,” Taiwan Mobile spokesperson Rosie Yu (俞若奚) said by phone. “The Tsai family is taking over now.”
Making its first move, the Tsai family has inked an agreement with Carlyle to purchase Kbro for NT$68 billion (US$2.12 billion) including absorbing the cable TV system operator’s NT$20 billion debt through an investment company founded by the family, the Chinese-language newspaper Economic Daily News reported yesterday.
“This is the direction we are studying with Carlyle ... We are not 100 percent sure about this deal yet,” Taiwan Mobile vice chairman Daniel Tsai (蔡明忠) told reporters on the sideline of a press conference for Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank (台北富邦銀行). Tsai doubles as chairman of Fubon Financial.
Taiwan Mobile inked a contract with Carlyle in September last year to buy 100 percent of Kbro’s shares for NT$52.8 billion, including absorbing its NT$20 billion in debt, in a cash and share-swap deal. The deal grounded to a halt after the contract expired late last month.
Over the past year, Taiwan Mobile has been working hard with the US private equity fund to find alternative options to complete the acquisition, but no breakthrough could be made because of an “outdated” law, Tsai said.
The Cable Television Act (有線電視法), enacted in 2003, originally aimed to prevent political and government entities from controlling media businesses, but now it has become an obstacle for the nation’s industries to achieve digital convergence between high-speed Internet access, television and telecoms, known as “triple play,” Tsai said.
The National Communications Commission has proposed the Cabinet allow the government to indirectly own as much as 10 percent of media companies. The plan still requires legislative approval.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY TED YANG
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
AI: Softbank’s stake increases in Nvidia and TSMC reflect Masayoshi Son’s effort to gain a foothold in key nodes of the AI value chain, from chip design to data infrastructure Softbank Group Corp is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the latest reflection of founder Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about US$3 billion by the end of March, up from US$1 billion in the prior quarter, regulatory filings showed. It bought about US$330 million worth of TSMC shares and US$170 million in Oracle Corp, they showed. Softbank’s signature Vision Fund has also monetized almost US$2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of this year,
RSS