Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控) yesterday told its investors that its cash dividends policy would remain stable, and that it has retained earnings of NT$110 billion (US$3.56 billion) that can be used for cash dividend payments next year, although it reported a significant decline in net profits so far this year.
The nation’s second-largest financial conglomerate in terms of assets saw cumulative net profit plummet 36 percent year-on-year to NT$83.7 billion during the first three quarters, driving down its shareholders’ equity 35 percent to NT$552 billion, company data showed.
The company aims to maintain stable cash dividends, although it is too early to consider next year’s distributions, Fubon Financial president Jerry Harn (韓蔚廷) told an online investors’ conference yesterday.
The financial service provider has about NT$110 billion available for cash dividends issuance next year, after deducting some special earnings reserves from the company’s NT$390 billion in retained earnings, Harn said.
Fubon Financial has no plan to raise new capital in the near term, given its healthy capital adequacy of 130 percent and a double-leverage ratio of 110 percent after injecting NT$15 billion into its property insurance arm Fubon Insurance Co (富邦產險) in August, Harn said.
Fubon Life Insurance Co (富邦人壽), the flagship unit of Fubon Financial, did not reclassify its assets as its local peers did. Its equity-to-asset ratio fell to 5 percent at the end of September amid plunging bond prices, corporate data showed.
The life insurer’s major solvency gauges are higher than regulatory thresholds. Its equity-to-asset ratio is higher than the regulatory threshold of 3 percent, while its risk-based capital ratio stood at more than 300 percent, also above the minimum of 200 percent, the company said.
Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank (台北富邦銀行) is the only arm under Fubon Financial that saw growth in net profit. The bank reported annual growth of 28.4 percent in net profit to NT$18.1 billion in the first nine months, due to a 12.7 percent gain in its interest income to NT$22.9 billion, driven by key interest rate hikes and asset growth, it said.
However, Taipei Fubon’s net fee income fell 10 percent to NT$7.7 billion, as more clients of its wealth management business turned conservative amid tumbling stock markets, it said.
Despite the central bank’s rate hike in September, its net interest margin, a gauge of banks’ profitability, dropped from a quarter earlier to 1.04 percent, as the loan-to-deposit ratio of its foreign currencies declined, it said.
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
KEY SECTOR: Taiwan’s new chip legislation is insufficient, and a more strategic ‘chip act’ that covers the whole semiconductor ecosystem is needed, MediaTek’s chairman said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) yesterday urged the government to formulate a state semiconductor strategy and comprehensive “chip act” that includes local chip designers and smaller-scale semiconductor companies, as they are facing intensifying competition from China. The government is playing an increasingly important role in safeguarding the local semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, given that the US, the EU and Japan are offering hefty subsidies and significant tax incentives to build semiconductor capacity domestically, as they have realized the strategic importance of semiconductors, Tsai said. To implement such a program, the government should take steps to finance a “chip act,” Tsai said
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
MOUNTING PRESSURE: Although bank failures in the US and Europe would not cause systemic risks, it would dampen consumers’ willingness to spend, GlobalWafers said GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s third-largest silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that the financial turmoil in the US and Europe has dimmed the outlook for chip demand in the second half of this year, as growing economic uncertainty could dampen consumer spending. The Hsinchu-based wafer manufacturer said it is seeing greater pressure from economic uncertainty on the industry’s recovery, as customers would have not expected Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and a tier-one bank like Credit Suisse Group SA to collapse suddenly. Although the failures are unlikely to cause systemic risks, consumers would be cautious of spending on non-essential items, such
RSS