SinoPac Financial Holdings Co’s (永豐金控) banking and securities units reported mixed performance for the first half of the year, as rate hikes worldwide boosted the bank’s interest-based income, but also affected global stock markets, the company told an investors’ conference in Taipei yesterday.
Bank SinoPac’s (永豐銀行) net income grew 27 percent to NT$7.5 billion (US$246.43 million) for the first six months, as its net interest income reached a record-high NT$6.68 billion in the second quarter, while first-half interest income expanded 17.2 percent year-on-year to NT$12.56 billion, the bank said.
Its profitability gauge, net interest margin (NIM), rose to 1.19 percent at the end of June, up from 1.07 percent at the end of March and compared with 1.04 percent a year earlier, thanks to central banks’ interest rate hikes, it said.
Photo: Kelson Wang, Taipei Times
“We expect our NIM to grow by at least 10 basis points for the whole of this year, from the end of last year,” Bank SinoPac president Eric Chuang (莊銘福) said.
Despite weakening financial markets, which generally lead to a decline in a bank’s wealth management business, SinoPac’s wealth management unit posted 3 percent annual growth in net fee income, it said.
In contrast, SinoPac Securities Co’s (永豐金證券) net income plunged 63 percent to NT$892 million for the first half of the year, while capital gains plummeted 85 percent to NT$106 million and revenue dropped 22 percent to NT$4.69 billion, as local equities performed poorly, company data showed.
The securities firm attributed the fall in net income to a double-digit percentage drop in stock market turnover in the first half of the year.
In the first six months, SinoPac Financial’s net income fell 4.2 percent to NT$8.22 billion from a year earlier, it said.
However, its cumulative net income in the first seven months had already returned to positive territory, at NT$10.31 billion, making it the only financial holding firm among its local peers to do so, president Stanley Chu (朱士廷) said.
The company also expects the central bank to continue to raise rates this month, and the US Federal Reserve’s hawkish comments last week indicated that it would continue rate hikes, Chu said.
“Investment will be more difficult by the end of the year, so we will stick to a conservative approach,” he said.
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