Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運), Taiwan’s largest container cargo shipping company, has acquired the entire stake in a Panama terminal in a bid to strengthen its presence in the Americas and bolster its competitive advantages.
The company spent US$268 million to take a 100 percent stake in Colon Container Terminal SA (CCT), acquiring the holdings from its affiliates, Evergreen Marine president Eric Hsieh (謝惠全) told a news conference at the Taiwan Stock Exchange in Taipei on Friday.
CCT is one of the most important transportation hubs for Evergreen Marine and its subsidiary Evergreen Marine (Asia) Pte Ltd in terms of its routes between Asia and the Americas, Hsieh said.
Photo: Wang Yi-hung, Taipei Times
The acquisition is expected to improve Evergreen Group’s (長榮集團) services and shipments, he said.
The terminal operator started operating on Oct. 30, 1997, opening new opportunities for Panama as a hub for regional distribution and transshipment, CCT said on its Web site.
CCT was previously the site of a former US naval base, which the company transformed into a container handling facility with two berths. It subsequently developed two additional berths, expanding the terminal’s area to 74.3 hectares.
CCT is also developing a 30-hectare logistics park on its concession lands, which are integrated with terminal operations, it said.
Evergreen Marine said it has also purchased about 79 million shares of subsidiary Evergreen Steel Corp (長榮鋼鐵) from the open market in after-hours trading on Friday, spending NT$3.82 billion (US$118.69 million) to boost its stake in the company to about 19 percent, Hsieh said.
Evergreen Marine seeks to benefit from the steel subsidiary’s stable bottom line, he said, adding that Evergreen Steel plans to expand investments in green energy to boost profitability.
Evergreen Marine earned NT$100.70 billion in net profit for the third quarter, up 26 percent from a year earlier, with earnings per share of NT$37.25.
Net profit for the first nine months of the year was NT$304.35 billion, up 92 percent from a year earlier, while earnings per share were NT$68.88 and gross margin was 68.36 percent.
Due to a recent capital reduction to lower the number of outstanding shares in circulation, Evergreen Marine’s book value per share rose sharply to NT$254.87 in the third quarter from NT$85.3 in the second quarter, the company said.
The company cut its paid-in capital by 60 percent from NT$52.91 billion to about NT$21.16 billion, marking the first capital reduction in the company’s history.
Despite the large cut, Evergreen Marine has increased share value by a corresponding amount to maintain the company’s overall market capitalization.
A subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company that has lost control of two critical ports on the Panama Canal said it is seeking US$2 billion of compensation in damages from Panama over its “illegal” takeover of the ports. Panama Ports Co, a unit of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings (長江和記實業), on Friday said in a statement that it is demanding the sum under international arbitration proceedings that it had already started. The Panamanian government last week seized control of the Balboa and Cristobal ports on each end of the Panama Canal, after the country’s Supreme Court declared earlier that a concession allowing
DETERRENCE: With 1,000 indigenous Hsiung Feng II and III missiles and 400 Harpoon missiles, the nation would boast the highest anti-ship missile density in the world With Taiwan wrapping up mass production of Hsiung Feng II and III missiles by December and an influx of Harpoon missiles from the US, Taiwan would have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world, a source said yesterday. Taiwan is to wrap up mass production of the indigenous anti-ship missiles by the end of year, as the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has been meeting production targets ahead of schedule, a defense official with knowledge of the matter said. Combined with the 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles Taiwan expects to receive from the US by 2028, the nation would have
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
RSS