The depreciation of the New Taiwan dollar has helped boost investment returns at Shin Kong Life Insurance Co (新光人壽), although its total profits plunged 60 percent annually amid tumbling financial markets, Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控) told an online investors’ conference yesterday.
The life insurer saw its after-hedge recurring yield rise to 3.77 percent at the end of September, from 2.2 percent a year earlier, and its after-hedge investment return edge up to 3.87 percent from 3.86 percent a year earlier, company data showed.
FOREX GAINS
Photo: Allen Wu, Taipei Times
As the NT dollar has lost value against the US dollar this year, the company in the first nine months generated foreign exchange gains of 0.55 percentage points from its assets denominated in foreign currencies, compared with a loss of 1.75 percentage points a year earlier, the data showed.
Shin Kong Life Insurance invested more in foreign fixed incomes given higher bond yields amid rate hikes, with the ratio of overseas fixed income to its total portfolio rising to 67.3 percent, from 63.7 percent a year earlier, the data showed.
NORTH AMERICAN BONDS
Bonds issued in North America made up 39.7 percent of its total overseas bonds, up from 38.7 percent a year earlier, while European bonds remained flat at about 23 percent and Asian bonds fell to 37.5 percent.
Shin Kong Life Insurance reduced its investment in local stocks, which have tumbled during the first nine months, with the proportion of local stocks in its portfolio sliding from 7.2 percent to 6 percent at the end of September.
Sales of insurance policies denominated in foreign currencies expanded 19.5 percent year-on-year to NT$33.36 billion, accounting for 79.5 percent of all policies, up from a weighing of 78.8 percent a year earlier.
The life insurer said that it would continue to focus on sales of insurance policies denominated in foreign currencies, as such products help it earn more interest spread and reduce its exposure to volatility in the currency exchange rate, it said.
CALL FOR DIVIDENDS
Meanwhile, as Shin Kong Financial’s net profit shrank 52 percent annually to NT$10.37 billion (US$335 million), or earnings per share of NT$0.65, investors at yesterday’s conference asked whether it could distribute cash dividends next year.
The company still has a capital surplus of about NT$18 billion, but it needs to discuss with the regulators whether it could use the funds to distribute dividends, it said, adding that it faces some pressure.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
POWER FORWARD: The US company’s bullish revenue projection also lifted the shares of Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC and Japanese equipment supplier Advantest Nvidia Corp’s forecast for surging revenue surprised even the most bullish analysts on Wall Street, propelling the chipmaker to the cusp of a US$1 trillion market capitalization and igniting a global jump in stocks linked to artificial intelligence (AI). The Santa Clara, California-based company gained as much as 29 percent in extended US trading, on course for a record high, after saying it expects sales to reach about US$11 billion in the three months ending July. That gain puts Nvidia on track also to rack up the biggest one-day valuation jump in US company history. Nvidia, the biggest supplier of the advanced
RSS