Local financial institutions, including banks, insurance companies, securities and futures brokerages, and investment trusts, last year saw aggregate profits soar to their second-highest in history, despite headwinds faced by life insurers in the final two months of the year, the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) said yesterday.
Their combined pretax profit totaled NT$703.6 billion (US$22.58 billion), up 46.71 percent from NT$479.6 billion a year earlier, the commission’s data showed.
Financial institutions posted record profits of NT$935.55 billion in 2021, the data showed.
Photo: Kelson Wang, Taipei Times
Banks were the largest contributor to last year’s profit growth, reporting record pretax profits of NT$505.7 billion, up 17.03 percent from NT$432.1 billion in 2022, thanks to rising currency swap income, a capital market recovery, and double-digit percentage growth in fee income for wealth management and credit card businesses, the commission said.
Securities and futures brokerages and investment trusts followed with a combined pretax profit of NT$99.8 billion, a 50.98 percent increase from NT$66.1 billion the previous year, buoyed by a stock market boom, it said.
Insurance companies posted a lower-than-expected pretax profit of NT$98.1 billion for last year, as life insurers sustained foreign-exchange losses amid the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar against the US dollar in the November-to-December period, it said.
However, insurance companies’ bottom line last year improved greatly from the previous year, when they registered a combined loss of NT$18.6 billion, it said.
FSC Chairman Thomas Huang (黃天牧) said he is optimistic about the sector’s prospects this year.
While the financial industry is resilient, companies should be cautious about market, credit and liquidity risks, as well as challenges from false information and corporate governance, he told a news conference in New Taipei City.
The commission, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, hopes financial institutions would further promote innovation and diversification in financial products without sacrificing financial stability, Huang said.
The FSC will assist the industry in upgrading and moving toward net zero carbon emissions and sustainable development, he added.
To improve odd-lot trading opportunities and efficiency on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) and the over-the-counter Taipei Exchange, the commission plans to shorten the matching interval of intraday odd-lot trading from one minute to five seconds by the end of this year, Securities and Futures Bureau Director-General Sam Chang (張振山) told the news conference.
The intraday odd-lot trading system was first implemented in October 2020 to attract small-capital investors.
The commission has requested that the TWSE and the Taipei Exchange revise odd-lot trading regulations and promote activities among securities firms and investors to achieve inclusive finance, Chang said.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
RSS