King’s Town Bank (京城銀行) yesterday proposed to distribute a cash dividend of NT$1.8 per share based on last year’s earnings, becoming the nation’s third bank to surpass the regulatory limit of NT$1.5 per share for cash dividends.
Article 50 of the Banking Act (銀行法) demands that a bank set at least 30 percent of its net profit as legal reserve each year.
Until a bank’s accumulated legal reserve reaches the level of its paid-in capital, the cash dividend it can distribute would be capped at NT$1.5 per share, according to the act.
Photo: Lee Chin-hui, Taipei Times
Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank Ltd (上海商業儲蓄銀行) was the first bank in Taiwan that met the requirements, paying cash dividends of NT$1.8 per share in 2017, NT$2 in 2018 and NT$2.05 in 2019, company data showed.
State-run Mega International Commercial Bank (兆豐銀行) came in second, paying cash dividends of NT$1.96 per share in 2018 and NT$1.92 in 2019.
Both Shanghai Commercial and Mega Bank have not announced their cash dividend proposals for last year.
King’s Town’s accumulated legal reserve reached NT$11.43 billion (US$403.9 million) last year, higher than its paid-in capital of NT$11.21 billion, the Tainan-based bank told an investors’ conference in Taipei.
As the bank’s earnings per share hit a record NT$4.9 last year, the proposed cash dividend of NT$1.8 per share represents a payout ratio of 36.73 percent.
“We hope our distribution remains stable and consistent for years,” King’s Town chairman Terence Tai (戴誠志) said. “We expect our cash dividend to stand at least NT$1.8 for the next five to 10 years. That is our commitment to our shareholders.”
With the bank’s share price falling 2.66 percent to NT$38.45 in Taipei trading yesterday, the proposed cash dividend of NT$1.8 per share suggested a yield rate of 4.68 percent.
King’s Town reported that its net profit last year grew 61.51 percent year-on-year to NT$5.49 billion, which it attributed to a double-digit rise in its net interest income due to lending growth and good returns from overseas bond investments, while provision dropped 71.96 percent from a year earlier.
Net interest income grew 10.32 percent to NT$5.25 billion, while fee income increased 3.73 percent to NT$1.91 billion, company data showed.
The bank's return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE) reached 2.06 percent and 14.31 percent last year respectively.
The bank holds a cautious, but optimistic outlook for this year, expecting its net interest margin to remain flat, it said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts