Shareholders of SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控) and King’s Town Bank (KTB, 京城銀行) yesterday approved a merger plan that could make SinoPac Taiwan’s seventh-largest financial conglomerate.
The companies signed a merger agreement in December last year according to which SinoPac would buy 100 percent of KTB shares for NT$60 billion (US$1.82 billion) through cash and share swaps.
Under the share swap, one common KTB share would trade for 1.15 SinoPac shares, the companies said.
Photo: Lee Chin-hui, Taipei Times
SinoPac Financial president Stanley Chu (朱士廷) has said the integration would enable SinoPac to serve more customers in southern Taiwan.
Most of Tainan-based KTB’s 66 branches are in Yunlin County, Chiayi County, Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung County, while most of SinoPac’s 125 branches are in northern Taiwan, Chu said.
KTB chairman Tai Chen-chih (戴誠志) has said he intends to retire and the lender’s vice chairman Tsai Chiung-ting (蔡炅廷) has said he is not interested in taking over.
Tai and Tsai would not join SinoPac’s boardroom following the completion of the one-year integration, as they prefer to be shareholders and trust SinoPac’s management to the board, Chu said.
SinoPac said would next seek approval from the Financial Supervisory Commission for the acquisition, even though the KTB workers’ union last week rejected its retention and compensation offers.
SinoPac earlier said it would retain all KTB employees for at least three years and would provide bonuses for those who choose to stay, especially banking professionals.
The premium linked to the buyout bid has fallen from 8.8 percent in December last year to 4.36 percent on Thursday last week, as a result of local share corrections, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
The merger would also make SinoPac’s banking arm Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行) the third-largest lender in Taiwan by measure of loans to small and medium-sized enterprises, SinoPac Financial said.
KTB focuses on commercial banking, while SinoPac is more specialized in institutional banking and serving firms with larger amounts of capital, Chu said.
KTB would auction off its capital leasing unit and liquidate its securities arm, as the former has a different business orientation from SinoPac’s capital leasing unit, the two sides said.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS