Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控), the nation’s second-largest financial service provider by market value, completed its acquisition of a 19.99 percent stake in Xiamen City Commericial Bank (廈門商銀) on Saturday, snapping up three board seats and top-ranking managerial posts at the Chinese bank, its press statement said late on Saturday night.
Fubon Financial has named three seats on the Chinese bank’s 11-member board, including Charles Kao (高朝陽), former head of its banking unit, who was elected the first Taiwanese president of Xiamen City Commerical Bank, the statement said.
Kao, on assuming his new post, said that the Chinese bank may evaluate this year new banking opportunities in neighboring cities such as Quanzhou, Fuzhou and Zhangzhou in Fujian Province, Chinese media reports said.
The bank would be interested in going public and upgrading to a provincial bank if business is good in the next year, Kao was quoted as saying.
Kao said the Chinese bank currently has 656 employees in 32 branches, and has absorbed 14.6 billion yuan (US$2.1 billion) in deposits, or a 6.5 percent market share in Xiaman.
During its shareholder meeting on Saturday, Xiamen City Commercial Bank approved a fund-raising proposal by issuing 242 million new shares, priced at 2.3025 yuan per share, to raise 557 million yuan, or a 48 percent stake of the bank.
Fubon Financial will spend 230 million yuan to take up the bank’s 99.95 million new shares, or a 19.99 percent stake, and the Chinese municipal city government’s bureau of finance will acquire another 2.1216 million shares to make it the bank’s biggest shareholder with a 26.7 percent stake while several other Chinese investors will take up a total of 28.01 percent, the statement said.
After the new capital injection, Xiamen City Commercial Bank’s net worth will exceed 1 billion yuan, boosting the capital adequacy ratio to over 10 percent with a 100 percent coverage ratio.
Fubon Financial chairman Daniel Tsai (蔡明忠) said that his bank’s China-bound investment marks an important historical breakthrough in cross-strait financial exchange.
Fubon Financial vowed to extend its complete financial services to 2,500 Taiwanese businesses in China.
As of the end of last year, Xiamen City Commercial Bank had 17.744 billion yuan in total assets and posted 595 million yuan in earnings and 10 million yuan in after-tax net profits.
SPECULATION: The central bank cut the loan-to-value ratio for mortgages on second homes by 10 percent and denied grace periods to prevent a real-estate bubble The central bank’s board members in September agreed to tighten lending terms to induce a soft landing in the housing market, although some raised doubts that they would achieve the intended effect, the meeting’s minutes released yesterday showed. The central bank on Sept. 18 introduced harsher loan restrictions for mortgages across Taiwan in the hope of curbing housing speculation and hoarding that could create a bubble and threaten the financial system’s stability. Toward the aim, it cut the loan-to-value ratio by 10 percent for second and subsequent home mortgages and denied grace periods for first mortgages if applicants already owned other residential
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip assembly and testing manufacturing (ATM) service provider, expects to double its leading-edge advanced technology services revenue next year to more than US$1 billion, benefiting from strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips, a company executive said on Thursday. That would be the second year that ASE has doubled its advanced chip packaging and testing technology revenue, following an estimate of more than US$500 million for this year. ASE is one of the major beneficiaries from the AI boom as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is outsourcing production of advanced chip
TECHNOLOGY EXIT: The selling of Apple stock might be related to the death of Berkshire vice chairman Charlie Munger last year, an analyst said Billionaire Warren Buffett is now sitting on more than US$325 billion in cash after continuing to unload billions of US dollars worth of Apple Inc and Bank of America Corp shares this year and continuing to collect a steady stream of profits from all of Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s assorted businesses without finding any major acquisitions. Berkshire on Saturday said it sold off about 100 million more Apple shares in the third quarter after halving its massive investment in the iPhone maker the previous quarter. The remaining stake of about 300 million shares was valued at US$69.9 billion at the end of
RSS