Allianz SE doesn’t rule out acquisitions in developing countries and expects growth in China to continue. In Taiwan, it plans to almost double its number of insurance agents.
“We are not excluding acquisitions in developing countries, but it is not high on our list of priorities,” Werner Zedelius, a management-board member at the Munich-based company, told reporters in Taipei yesterday. “The focus is on internal growth.”
Allianz aims to boost the number of agents in Taiwan from 1,680 to 3,000 next year, said Chris James, CEO of Allianz Taiwan Life Insurance Co (安聯人壽).
Allianz plans to strengthen its distribution channels and focus on introducing more regular premium products and protection products in global markets, Zedelius said. Allianz ended a seven-year foray into full-scale banking in January when it sold Dresdner Bank to Commerzbank AG for 5.1 billion euros (US$7.1 billion).
“We are positive and remain committed to our business in Asia, and we see considerable growth coming over the next three years,” Zedelius said.
Allianz’s Taiwan life insurance unit ranked eighth in the domestic market and has 4.4 percent market share. Total premiums in the first four months reached NT$19.8 billion (US$602 million).
Still, Allianz won’t consider buying American International Group Inc.’s Taiwan unit, or invest in the island’s real estate market, Zedelius said.
AIG is looking for buyers for Nan Shan Life Insurance Co (南山人壽), the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported yesterday.
In April, Allianz sold 3.216 billion Hong Kong-listed shares, or half its stake, in Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd (ICBC, 中國工商銀行) as a lockup ended.
“We don’t have any plans in this regard,” Zedelius said when asked about plans to sell more ICBC shares in October, when a lockup agreement on the remainder of the shares ends.
After the April sale, Allianz holds 0.97 percent of ICBC’s total outstanding shares, and 3.87 percent of ICBC’s Hong Kong-listed shares, the insurer said in a statement on April 28.
“After holding the ICBC stake for some years, selling half of it was a thing we thought at that time a commercially viable decision,” Zedelius said.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
AI: Softbank’s stake increases in Nvidia and TSMC reflect Masayoshi Son’s effort to gain a foothold in key nodes of the AI value chain, from chip design to data infrastructure Softbank Group Corp is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the latest reflection of founder Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about US$3 billion by the end of March, up from US$1 billion in the prior quarter, regulatory filings showed. It bought about US$330 million worth of TSMC shares and US$170 million in Oracle Corp, they showed. Softbank’s signature Vision Fund has also monetized almost US$2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of this year,
RSS