Interest rates for new loans at the nation’s five major state-run banks stood at 1.224 percent last month, down 0.031 percentage points from August, as pricing competition sharpened, the central bank said on Friday.
The monetary policymaker compared the lending rates of Bank of Taiwan (臺灣銀行), Land Bank of Taiwan (土地銀行), Taiwan Cooperative Bank (合作金庫銀行), Hua Nan Commercial Bank (華南銀行) and First Commercial Bank (第一銀行), and found that smaller lenders tend to take cues from state-run peers when setting their own rates.
The central bank attributed the downturn to an increase in fresh lending to government agencies and large corporations, which have better credit profiles and could secure cheaper loans.
The decrease was also aided by lenders who were seeking to digest idle cash and vied for customers.
Meanwhile, interest rates for new mortgages dropped by 0.003 percentage points to 1.346 percent last month, the lowest in history, as lenders offered preferential terms to woo quality customers and whole-batch mortgage cases, the central bank said.
Housing transactions took a downturn in previous months following a local COVID-19 outbreak that began in May, but have recovered momentum in the past few weeks, the central bank said, adding that new mortgages increased by NT$12.05 billion (US$431.87 million) from the previous month to NT$55.55 billion last month.
The housing price index set by Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) showed that prices in Taipei gained 5.4 percent this year and the advance hit 9.3 percent in New Taipei City.
Separately, the Financial Supervisory Commission on Thursday approved E.Sun Commercial Bank’s (玉山銀行) application to open an office in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
E.Sun has a branch in Vietnam’s Dong Nai Province and operates a representative office in Hanoi. The bank expects the new Ho Chi Minh City office to help expand its presence in Southeast Asia.
State-run Mega International Commercial Bank (兆豐銀行) last month secured the Vietnamese government’s approval to open an office in the northern city of Haiphong, six years after Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行) won a permission to open a branch in Ho Chi Minh City in 2015.
The commission said that 14 Taiwanese banks have set up representative offices and branches in Vietnam.
Their combined pretax profits in the first six months of the year totaled NT$939 million, down 38.5 percent from a year earlier, due to slowing lending growth amid economic uncertainty, it said.
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
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