Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG) has not given up on a merger with UFJ Holdings to create the world's biggest banking group, its chief said yesterday amid a report SMFG had bettered a cash offer from a rival.
Struggling UFJ Holdings, Japan's fourth biggest banking group, said a week ago it had declined by telephone a merger offer from the Sumitomo group as it wanted to join hands with Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group (MTFG).
But, undaunted, SMFG president Toshifumi Nishikawa said on the private Asahi television network his group was still wooing UFJ and was ready to provide it with "necessary funds fully".
Nishikawa also said the merger would be done "in the spirit of being on an equal-footing" in an apparent bid to woo UFJ whose executives may lose posts in the aftermath of a merger with MTFG.
Newspapers reported yesterday that SMFG had sent a written merger proposal to the UFJ group on Saturday following the refusal of UFJ management to meet Sumitomo Mitsui executives in person.
The proposal says Sumitomo Mitsui will inject more than ?500 billion (US$4.5 billion) into UFJ, which has been struggling under a mountain of non-performing loans, and calls for the establishment of a joint holding company by April next year, the Nihon Keizai and Asahi newspapers said.
The offer was apparently better than about ?500 billion committed by rival MTFG, Asahi said, adding Sumitomo Mitsui had said in the letter the capital injection could be expanded to a maximum of ?700 billion.
The proposal also envisages the merger of banking units under the holding company in October next year, the papers said.
The Nihon Keizai economic daily added UFJ Holdings was still believed to be sticking to its original plan to merge with MTFG.
Nishikawa did not confirm the reports but suggested it would be a loss for UFJ not to sit down at the negotiating table with his group.
"It is commonsense for company managers to think about shareholders' benefits," he said.
Other reports said UFJ would seek assistance from automaker Toyota Motor Corp and Nippon Life Insurance in addition to funds from MTFG.
UFJ Holdings needs more money to dispose of increased bad loans, the Yomiuri and Mainichi Shimbun said. The group announced last Friday its non-performing loans reached ?4.62 trillion at the end of June, up from ?3.95 trillion three months ago.
UFJ plans to merge with MTFG, Japan's second-largest and most profitable bank, by the end of September next year. Its merger with either Sumitomo Mitsui or MTFG would create the world's largest banking group with assets of at least ?180 trillion.
Merger talks between UFJ Holdings and MTFG hit a snag when a Tokyo court issued an injunction barring UFJ from conducting talks involving the sale of its trust banking unit.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has