Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控) yesterday announced that it plans to acquire at least a 50 percent stake in Jih Sun Financial Holding Co (日盛金控) via a public tender offer valued at NT$24.53 billion (US$861 million), the first merger or acquisition of a financial holding company in the nation.
Fubon eventually aims to fully acquire Jih Sun, in a deal that would cost NT$49.04 billion.
Fubon said it had received approval from the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) to proceed with the deal.
It is preparing to file another application with the nation’s competition watchdog, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC), company spokeswoman Sophia Wang (王瑋) told a news conference in Taipei.
If the FTC gives the green light to the acquisition, Fubon plans to acquire the shares via public tender from Tuesday next week to Feb. 1, Wang said.
With the minimum number of shares to be acquired set at 1.88 billion, or a 50 percent stake in Jih Sun, and the maximum set at 3.77 billion shares, or 100 percent, the public offer is estimated to cost Fubon between NT$24.53 billion and NT$49.04 billion, she said.
Fubon would offer to buy each Jih Sun share for NT$13, representing a premium of 24.8 percent over its average closing price over the past 20 trading days, she said.
Fubon, the nation’s second-largest financial holding company by assets after Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金控), expects the acquisition to enhance its presence in the brokerage and banking sectors, Wang said.
It would initially borrow to fund the acquisition, but it would not raise its double-leverage ratio beyond the regulatory cap of 125 percent, she said.
Fubon’s double-leverage ratio stood at 113.23 percent as of the end of October, about the mid point of ratios reported by the nation’s 15 financial holding companies, FSC data showed.
The company plans to raise fresh capital by issuing common shares and special shares in the second quarter of next year, Wang said.
“After integrating the 44 branches of Jih Sun International Bank (日盛銀行), the banking unit of Jih Sun Financial, with Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank’s (台北富邦銀行) 135 branches, our branch network would rank first among all banks in Taiwan,” she said.
However, Taipei Fubon Bank has not yet decided if it would retain all of Jih Sun’s 44 branches and it would take balanced regional development into account when integrating the branches, she added.
Fubon Securities Co (富邦證券), the company’s securities arm with the third-largest market share in the nation, would benefit from merging with Jih Sun Securities Co (日盛證券), as the latter ranks seventh by market share, Wang said.
Whether Fubon would retain Jih Sun’s employees would mainly depend on their willingness to join the merged company, she said.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by