Italian banks Banco Popolare SC and Banca Popolare di Milano Scarl (BPM) announced on Wednesday they would merge, in a long-awaited deal that would create the country’s third-largest bank by assets.
The deal creates a lender with more than 25,000 staff and 4 million customers, and could help drive consolidation among Italy’s fragmented banking sector.
The deal has been delayed as the banks struggle to meet higher capital requirements, weighed down by hundreds of billions of euros of bad loans and weak economic growth.
Banco Popolare, which is to own 54 percent of the new company, is seeking to raise 1 billion euros (US$1.1 billion) of capital before the merger is completed by December, Bloomberg News reported.
“We are particularly pleased to have succeeded... given the severe and negative market conditions, in launching an operation as extraordinary and significant as the merger of Banco Popolare and Banca Popolare di Milano,” Banco Popolare president Carlo Fratta Pasini said.
The as-yet-unnamed lender is to have two headquarters — the legal side headed from Milan, Italy and administrative side in Verona, Italy.
With a market capitalization of about 5.5 billion euros, 171 billion euros in assets and 2,500 branches, it is to be Italy’s No. 3 lender behind Intesa Sanpaolo SpA and UniCredit SpA.
The European Central Bank (ECB) has been piling pressure on Italy’s banks to deal with their weak balance sheets and the head of its supervisory arm on Tuesday said the merger must succeed.
“The bank has to be strong at the very beginning, this will be the third Italian bank,” ECB Supervisory Council president Daniele Nouy said.
The merger is “a very important operation, it has to be a success, precisely because it’s maybe the first of a series of other ones,” she told the European parliament’s committee for economic and monetary affairs.
However, she said that similar banking mergers elsewhere had “ended up creating a worse situation or difficulties for the banks coming from the merger.”
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
An Indonesian animated movie is smashing regional box office records and could be set for wider success as it prepares to open beyond the Southeast Asian archipelago’s silver screens. Jumbo — a film based on the adventures of main character, Don, a large orphaned Indonesian boy facing bullying at school — last month became the highest-grossing Southeast Asian animated film, raking in more than US$8 million. Released at the end of March to coincide with the Eid holidays after the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, the movie has hit 8 million ticket sales, the third-highest in Indonesian cinema history, Film
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designer specializing in server chips, expects revenue to decline this year due to sagging demand for 5-nanometer artificial intelligence (AI) chips from a North America-based major customer, a company executive said yesterday. That would be the first contraction in revenue for Alchip as it has been enjoying strong revenue growth over the past few years, benefiting from cloud-service providers’ moves to reduce dependence on Nvidia Corp’s expensive AI chips by building their own AI accelerator by outsourcing chip design. The 5-nanometer chip was supposed to be a new growth engine as the lifecycle
RSS