Taiwan’s financial conglomerates reported a total of NT$278.1 billion (US$8.98 billion) in net profit for the first three quarters, an improvement of 12.61 percent from the same period last year, but profit growth slowed last month as US-China trade tensions began to take a bigger toll on the global markets.
Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金控), the nation’s largest financial holding firm by market value, posted NT$54.56 billion in net profit for the first three quarters, or earnings per share (EPS) of NT$4.17, making it the most profitable among 15 listed peers in the first nine months, a company filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange showed.
However, the company’s net profit last month fell to NT$2.14 billion, a 58 percent decrease from August.
Cathay Financial’s main subsidiary, Cathay Life Insurance Co (國泰人壽), saw its net profit last month dip to NT$40 million as the insurer was affected by a stronger New Taiwan dollar at the end of the month, the company said, adding that its first-year premiums for protection-type policies expanded 61 percent year-on-year last month.
The company’s banking arm, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) was the stronger performer, posting earnings of NT$21.7 billion on the back of strong loan-to-deposit ratios and steady fee income.
Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控) posted a profit of NT$2.9 billion last month to top its peers, while its profit between January and last month rose 13.02 percent year-on-year to NT$50.01 billion, or EPS of NT$4.74.
Fubon Life Insurance Co (富邦人壽) recorded a net profit of NT$30.95 billion for the first three quarters, a 14 percent annual increase on strong investment returns.
Its banking arm, Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank (台北富邦銀行), saw its net income rise 12 percent on the back of higher interest income.
Meanwhile, Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控) posted a net loss of NT$2.11 billion last month, due to widening foreign exchange losses, as well as higher hedging costs, it said.
However, it reported net income of NT$19.41 billion in the first nine months, or EPS of NT$1.73.
The company said that its foreign exchange losses could begin to narrow in the final quarter if the New Taiwan dollar continues to depreciate against the US dollar.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness