Ministry of Finance officials and other industry officials yesterday urged local banks to be more creative and stop copying their rivals' financial services and marketing techniques.
"`Innovate or die' is key for the nation's banking sector to remain competitive," Thomas Huang (黃天牧), secretary-general of the ministry's Bureau of Monetary Affairs, said yesterday during a financial reform meeting held at National Taiwan University.
Diversification
The chairman of the Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp (
"Diversification is the best way to deal with the problem of an oversupply of banks," Chen said.
There are 52 major commercial banks with over 3,500 branches nationwide.
Most choose to copy their rivals' successful marketing plans for popular products such as cards.
For example, Cosmos Bank's (
NPL ratio still a problem
Meanwhile, another participant in the National Taiwan Univer-sity meeting, Citibank country manager Eric Chen (陳聖德), praised local banks' efforts last year to clean up their bad loans.
"The efforts paid off since shares of some banks rose," he said, adding "stock investors didn't dump shares because of the losses created by the writing-off of bad loans."
According to the Bureau of Monetary Affairs, local banks wrote off a record NT$413.9 billion in bad loans as of the end of last December.
The write-offs generated over NT$100 billion in losses.
The nation's non-performing loan ratio (NPL) dropped to 8.86 percent last December from 11.74 percent last March.
Despite the decline in the NPL ratio last year, PFP Legislator Christine Liu (
Political interference
Liu said that in 1998 the then KMT government began adopting measures that violated the free-market mechanism, allowing the non-performing loan problem to fester and the banking sector to withhold information from the public.
She also said that erroneous financial policies by the DPP government have lead to the reforms being put on the back burner.
In response to Liu's criticisms, Huang said that the government's financial reform plan has neither slowed down nor ceased.
Huang said the government is undertaking a comprehensive financial reform plan that involves the banking sector, insurers and securities houses.
"It's a race without a finishing line," Huang said.
Huang said the government is expected to adopt a stricter NPL definition in April that will meet international accounting standards.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) forecast that its wafer shipments this quarter would grow up to 7 percent sequentially and the factory utilization rate would rise to 75 percent, indicating that customers did not alter their ordering behavior due to the US President Donald Trump’s capricious US tariff policies. However, the uncertainty about US tariffs has weighed on the chipmaker’s business visibility for the second half of this year, UMC chief financial officer Liu Chi-tung (劉啟東) said at an online earnings conference yesterday. “Although the escalating trade tensions and global tariff policies have increased uncertainty in the semiconductor industry, we have not
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
Intel Corp has named Tasha Chuang (莊蓓瑜) to lead Intel Taiwan in a bid to reinforce relations between the company and its Taiwanese partners. The appointment of Chuang as general manager for Intel Taiwan takes effect on Thursday, the firm said in a statement yesterday. Chuang is to lead her team in Taiwan to pursue product development and sales growth in an effort to reinforce the company’s ties with its partners and clients, Intel said. Chuang was previously in charge of managing Intel’s ties with leading Taiwanese PC brand Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), which included helping Asustek strengthen its global businesses, the company
RSS