Bad loan ratio increases
The domestic banking sector’s ratio of bad loans, including loans under surveillance, edged up slightly to 1.63 percent in March, up 0.02 percentage points month-on-month, the Financial Supervisory Commission’s latest statistics showed yesterday.
Thirty-seven domestic banks loaned a total of NT$18.1 trillion (US$539 billion) at the end of March — a NT$120 billion drop from the previous month, NT$294.6 billion of which became non-performing loans (NPLs), the data showed.
Among them, Chinfon Commercial Bank (慶豐銀行) continued to hold the highest NPL ratio of 36.89 percent, followed by Bank of Panhsin’s (板信銀行) 4.77 percent, Cosmos Bank Taiwan’s (萬泰銀行) 4.57 percent, Jih Sun International Bank’s (日盛銀行) 4.03 percent and Citibank Taiwan Ltd’s (花旗台灣) 3.17 percent, while the remaining banks kept a NPL ratio of less than 3 percent.
7-Eleven opens in Shanghai
Shanghai’s first 7-Eleven store opened yesterday, adding to the more than 590 already established in China.
President Chain Store Corp (統一超商), the franchise holder, plans to have 300 7-Eleven stores in Shanghai in five years, spokeswoman Lillian Lin (林立莉) said.
President Chain said 7-Eleven has more than 35,000 stores in 24 countries. Beijing has 75 shops and the southern city of Guangzhou has 512, it said. President Chain runs about 4,800 7-Elevens in Taiwan.
Job-seekers favor Chunghwa
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) has emerged as the favorite place to find a job by Taiwan’s fresh job seekers, as the global economic downturn makes job security their top demand.
Cheers monthly magazine found in its latest poll that Chunghwa Telecom has for the first time become the company most coveted by fresh graduates of university or postgraduate schools in Taiwan among 100 top choices.
The company has edged out Taiwan’s top electronics maker, which was the new job seekers’ top choice last year.
Chunghwa Telecom was followed by Uni-President Group (統一集團), Eslite Bookstore (誠品), China Steel Corp (中鋼) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), Cheers reported.
ProMOS sells property
ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德科技), Taiwan’s most unprofitable memory-chip maker, sold a property to Kingston Technology Co for NT$1.17 billion (US$35 million).
ProMOS booked NT$38.8 million in losses from the sale of a building located in Hsinchu, where the company is based, it said in a Taiwan exchange filing yesterday.
China steel posts profit
China Steel Corp (中鋼), Taiwan’s largest steelmaker, booked a profit of NT$506.04 million (US$15 million) from selling 13.5 million of its shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) for NT$695.43 million.
The shares were sold at an average of NT$51.51 each between April 23 and Wednesday, the Kaohsiung-based company said yesterday.
From April 16 to April 20, the company sold 10 million TSMC shares for NT$514.54 million.
Evergreen posts loss
Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運), Asia’s biggest container line, swung to a first-quarter loss of NT$2.74 billion (US$83 million), or NT$0.89 per share, from a profit of NT$367 million, or NT$0.12, a year earlier, it said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
The firm benefited from a return to profit at affiliate EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空). The airline, 19 percent owned by Evergreen, posted its first quarterly profit in more than a year on increased flights to China and lower fuel costs.
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
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
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
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