Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd (ICBC, 中國工商銀行), the world’s largest by market value, is branching into the -broker-dealer business in the US as it moves to expand overseas, a report said yesterday.
ICBC paid US$1 to take over the Prime Dealer Services unit of Fortis Securities, which is controlled by France’s BNP Paribas SA, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the deal.
The report said the deal makes ICBC the first Chinese bank to buy a foreign broker-dealer.
The Fortis operation only has 75 existing customers, but could be a stepping stone for ICBC’s expansion into the underwriting of securities in the US market, the sources told the newspaper.
“It’s a unique opportunity and a good entry point for ICBC,” the former chief executive of Fortis Securities and chief executive officer of the new entity, Joseph Spillane, told the paper in an interview in New York.
Spillane predicted the new ICBC Financial Services, which will provide clearing and financing services to clients, would bring in about US$15 million in annual profits for ICBC.
He declined to comment on the financial terms of the deal.
The newspaper noted that the deal would allow ICBC to avoid US regulatory restrictions on foreign purchases of deposit-taking institutions.
ICBC’s profit rose nearly 27 percent in the third quarter to 42.6 billion yuan (US$6.38 billion dollars), according to a statement filed last week with the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
Last week, the bank announced it would take a 60 percent stake in Axa-Minmetals Assurance, the Chinese insurance unit of French insurer Axa SA.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
AT HIGH CAPACITY: Three-month order visibility on stable customer demand would push factory utilization to between 80 and 85 percent, Vanguard’s president said Foundry service provider Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) yesterday said it is unable to fully satisfy surging demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers and data centers, amid an AI infrastructure investment boom that is crowding out production of less advanced chips. Vanguard is facing an “undersupply of chips” made using mature process technologies, due to strong demand for AI products and improving demand from customers in the commercial, industrial and auto sectors, which are digesting excess inventory to a healthier level, company chairman Fang Leuh (方略) told a virtual investors’ conference. However, Vanguard gave a more conservative view on
RSS