After two years of preparation, the Koo's family-run business finally split into two major groups, one headed by 86-year-old Koo Chen-fu (
"The split-up aims to consolidate professional management in the [financial] business," Chinatrust president Jeffrey Koo Jr. (
New blood relatives who do not bear the surname of Koo should be allowed to take up management responsibilities based on their business expertise while the Koo family continues to serve as financers, 38-year-old Jeffrey Koo Jr. added.
Chinatrust yesterday confirmed that Jeffrey Koo relinquished his seat at the board of Taiwan Polypropylene Co (福聚公司) to the Koo's Group on Thursday, facilitating the split-up agreement reached two years ago by both clans.
Core businesses of the Koo's Group now include Taiwan Cement Corp (
Younger generations of both clans in the Koo family are also gradually taking over the helm including Jeffrey Koo Jr, who is the eldest son of Jeffrey Koo. He currently chairs the Chinatrust Commercial Bank (
Market watchers yesterday lauded the Koo family's progressive and clear-cut approach to differentiate their core businesses as well as to improve financial transparency.
Hsieh Chin-ho (
He added that the family appears to have retained a good working relationship among its members, although Jeffrey Koo's business outperformed Koo Chen-fu's ill-performing China Life Insurance in December 2001.
Koo Chen-fu may face a challenge ahead in cleaning up the mess left behind by his deceased eldest son, Chester Koo (辜啟允) -- who died of gall-bladder cancer at the age of 48 in 2001 -- at Taiwan Cement, which has a liability of NT$50 billion, Hsieh said.
But Mike Chow (
Taiwan Cement president Leslie Koo announced in April that the company plans to invest US$2 billion in its China-based plants over the next five years, aiming to become the largest cement maker in China by 2008.
William Fong (
"The move will help dismiss market concerns that a family-run business usually involves complicated hidden debts that are not easy to detect and fear that the burden will be put on the banking business," Fong said.
Fong added that Chinatrust has been toning down its family-run nature by recruiting professionals such as Eric Chen (陳聖德), formerly country officer of Citigroup Taiwan, and his 19 top staff.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS