After reaping a 112 percent growth in profit last year, Taishin Financial Holding Co (
"Our merger partners don't necessarily have to be banks," Taishin Financial chairman Thomas Wu (吳東亮) told an investors' conference yesterday. "We're also cooking small- and medium-sized acquisitions."
The company is one of 14 financial holding companies that the government aims to halve the number to seven in two years, in a bid to compete with foreign rivals.
Speculation is rife that Taishin Financial, the nation's seventh-largest financial service provider in terms of total assets, was the deal-breaker behind last week's planned merger between International Bank of Taipei (IBT, 台北商銀) and SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (建華金控).
According to local media reports, Taishin Financial expressed interests to merge with SinoPac Financial, and offered to pay NT$25 a share through a share-swap deal, which caused both SinoPac and IBT to stop discussing the proposed merger deal at their prospective board meetings held on Thursday.
But Wu yesterday kept a very low profile regarding this issue. He also refused to comment on the possibility of merging with SinoPac Financial in any way.
On the local bourse, Taishin Financial rose 0.7 percent to close at NT$29.3, SinoPac Financial was up 1.1 percent at NT$19.0, while IBT dropped 1.3 percent to NT$23.7.
Wu, however, expressed confidence that Taishin Financial would meet its NT$13.5 billion profit goal with a projected NT$3.19 earning per share (EPS) this year after having reported better-than-expected performance to successfully achieve its profit goals in the past three years.
"Our five-year goal is to increase our market value from less than US$1 billion [since the start-up in 2002] to the goal of US$5 billion [next year]," Wu said, adding that Taishin Financial currently has a market value of around US$4 billion.
According to the company's chief financial officer Carol Lai (賴昭吟), Taishin Financial saw its net profit up 55 percent to NT$11.3 billion last year from NT$7.3 billion in 2003 while the EPS growing from NT$2.16 to NT$2.8 during the same period.
Taishin Financial -- awarded last week by AsiaMoney magazine as the best managed company in Taiwan in 2004 -- saw a 31.5 percent loan growth in 2004 with consuming loan increasing by 38.9 percent and corporate loan by 16.7 percent while reaping a year-on-year 58 percent growth in the gross fee income performance, Lai said.
In the mean time, Taishin Financial also lowered its bad-loan ratio from 1.78 percent to 1.18 percent last year, she added.
CHIP WAR: Tariffs on Taiwanese chips would prompt companies to move their factories, but not necessarily to the US, unleashing a ‘global cross-sector tariff war’ US President Donald Trump would “shoot himself in the foot” if he follows through on his recent pledge to impose higher tariffs on Taiwanese and other foreign semiconductors entering the US, analysts said. Trump’s plans to raise tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan to as high as 100 percent would backfire, macroeconomist Henry Wu (吳嘉隆) said. He would “shoot himself in the foot,” Wu said on Saturday, as such economic measures would lead Taiwanese chip suppliers to pass on additional costs to their US clients and consumers, and ultimately cause another wave of inflation. Trump has claimed that Taiwan took up to
A start-up in Mexico is trying to help get a handle on one coastal city’s plastic waste problem by converting it into gasoline, diesel and other fuels. With less than 10 percent of the world’s plastics being recycled, Petgas’ idea is that rather than letting discarded plastic become waste, it can become productive again as fuel. Petgas developed a machine in the port city of Boca del Rio that uses pyrolysis, a thermodynamic process that heats plastics in the absence of oxygen, breaking it down to produce gasoline, diesel, kerosene, paraffin and coke. Petgas chief technology officer Carlos Parraguirre Diaz said that in
SUPPORT: The government said it would help firms deal with supply disruptions, after Trump signed orders imposing tariffs of 25 percent on imports from Canada and Mexico The government pledged to help companies with operations in Mexico, such as iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), shift production lines and investment if needed to deal with higher US tariffs. The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday announced measures to help local firms cope with the US tariff increases on Canada, Mexico, China and other potential areas. The ministry said that it would establish an investment and trade service center in the US to help Taiwanese firms assess the investment environment in different US states, plan supply chain relocation strategies and
Japan intends to closely monitor the impact on its currency of US President Donald Trump’s new tariffs and is worried about the international fallout from the trade imposts, Japanese Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato said. “We need to carefully see how the exchange rate and other factors will be affected and what form US monetary policy will take in the future,” Kato said yesterday in an interview with Fuji Television. Japan is very concerned about how the tariffs might impact the global economy, he added. Kato spoke as nations and firms brace for potential repercussions after Trump unleashed the first salvo of
RSS