Pan Asia Bank (泛亞銀行) yesterday forged a strategic partnership with the US-based GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp (GMACCM) to develop business opportunities in the nation's nascent securitization market.
Pan Asia chairman Victor Liu (劉維琪) yesterday said that GMACCM, which is a subsidiary of GMAC Commercial Holding Corp -- one of the global arms of General Motors Corp -- has put down an investment of NT$1.5 billion in the preferred shares of Pan Asia by taking up a 14.2 percent stake.
In return, Pan Asia will invite two GMACCM members to sit in its board of directors as special advisors for the next five years before its preferred shares are transformed into ordinary shares, Liu added.
"We'd like to take advantage of GMACCM's financial expertise to build up Pan Asia's competitiveness in the corporate-lending business and other fee income-based transactions," Liu said at a signing ceremony yesterday afternoon to officially announce the partnership.
Lauding the affiliation, GMAC Commercial Holding Corp president Scot Baker said in a pre-recorded speech played during the ceremony that Pan Asia's "deep knowledge of the local market, diversification of financial product, distribution of connections and its loyal customer base" were behind his company's decision to form a partnership with the local lender even though the bank suffered an after-tax loss of NT$1.34 billion in 2002.
After the NT$1.5 billion investment is secured, Pan Asia will be able to facilitate its total of NT$2.3 billion recapitalization plan, which will help increase the bank's capital adequacy ratio (BIS ratio) to meet the government's set 8 percent
requirement.
Pan Asia, however, is still posting a bad-loan ratio of 33 percent, or over NT$40 billion in non-performing loans (NPLs).
Liu refused to elaborate yesterday on the bank's write-off plans.
But he expressed hope that Pan Asia's affiliation with GMACCM will also focus on the bank's write-off of its NPLs.
Pan Asia will cooperate with GMACCM to tap into the nation's asset-based securitization market, NPL lending and real estate non-recourse financing services, Liu said.
He estimates that the size of the local non-recourse financing market may hit NT$100 billion.
Expressing its full commitment to Taiwan's markets, GMACCM chief executive officer and president Steve Lin (林至文) said yesterday that his company is confident about the long-term prospects for the local economy and real-estate market.
To reinforce its local operations, Lin said that the company has increased the number of its Taiwan-based staff from two to 25 in Taipei and Kaohsiung.
As the largest securitization player in Japan, he also said that the company is also very interested in taking part in Taiwan's nascent securitization market backed by properties and mortgage loans because the government is committed to fully liberalize and further restructure the local banking sector.
In addition, GMACCM plans to leverage its partnership with Pan Asia as a springboard to tap into the greater China markets by cultivating bilingual financial personnel who are familiar with local markets, Lin said.
Meanwhile, Liu said, Pan Asia is planning to change its name as Bowa Bank (
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS