The owner of Russia’s 12th-biggest lender by assets, B&N Bank, has asked the central bank for a bailout, the regulator said yesterday, three weeks after another leading Russian bank had to be rescued.
The central bank, in an e-mailed statement, said B&N Bank’s owners, a holding group controlled by tycoon Mikhail Gutseriev and his family, had asked for financial rehabilitation via the central bank’s Fund for Banking Sector Consolidation.
That is the same mechanism that is being used to rescue Otkritie FC Bank, Russia’s largest private lender, after it late last month said it had a hole in its balance sheet and needed help.
The central bank said that it would make a decision on the request from B&N Bank in the near future.
Safmar, the holding group that controls B&N Bank, declined to comment.
A combination of factors has been putting pressure on some Russian banks.
They were already under stress from an economic slowdown, made worse by Western sanctions, and have seen their share of bad debts rise over the past three years.
For some, their financial health worsened after the central bank, as part of a drive to clean up the banking sector, forced banks to make more rigorous provisions for non-performing loans. At the same time, banks’ margins have tightened because interest rates have come down.
Officials and banking sector analysts say they do not see a risk of a systemic banking crisis. They say that state-controlled banks, which account for more than half of assets in the sector, have strong capital positions and so are not in danger.
B&N Bank, founded in 1993, is part of a conglomerate controlled by Gutseriev and his family that includes oil companies, a property development portfolio and an electronics retailer.
B&N Bank embarked on an expansion strategy after 2010, taking over smaller lenders including Moskomprivatbank, Rost Bank, SKA-Bank and others. It is not on the central bank’s list of systemically important lenders.
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said Taiwan’s government plans to set up a business service company in Kyushu, Japan, to help Taiwanese companies operating there. “The company will follow the one-stop service model similar to the science parks we have in Taiwan,” Kuo said. “As each prefecture is providing different conditions, we will establish a new company providing services and helping Taiwanese companies swiftly settle in Japan.” Kuo did not specify the exact location of the planned company but said it would not be in Kumamoto, the Kyushu prefecture in which Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC, 台積電) has a
China has threatened severe economic retaliation against Japan if Tokyo further restricts sales and servicing of chipmaking equipment to Chinese firms, complicating US-led efforts to cut the world’s second-largest economy off from advanced technology. Senior Chinese officials have repeatedly outlined that position in recent meetings with their Japanese counterparts, people familiar with the matter said. Toyota Motor Corp privately told officials in Tokyo that one specific fear in Japan is that Beijing could react to new semiconductor controls by cutting the country’s access to critical minerals essential for automotive production, the people said, declining to be named discussing private affairs. Toyota is among
RSS