State-owned Land Bank of Taiwan (土地銀行) is poised to outperform its China-bound Taiwanese peers by injecting between 400 million yuan (US$58.69 million) and 600 million yuan into upgrading its Shanghai-based representative office after regulators across the Taiwan Strait finalize market access terms, a bank executive said yesterday.
That will far exceed the minimum capital requirement — 200 million yuan — which Chinese authorities currently impose on any foreign banks that open branches in the country, chairman Wang Yao-shing (王耀興) told a media briefing yesterday.
“Our [initial China-bound] investment won’t lag behind our [Taiwanese] peers,” he said.
Wang said the bank didn’t rule out the possibility of adding capital if its Taiwanese rivals also beef up their China-bound investments, or seeking city bank-level strategic partners in China.
He also said the bank would turn a profit in Shanghai after the second year since the regulator there would only allow foreign banks — which must stay in the red for two of their first three years in-country — to operate Chinese yuan-denominated businesses. Wang said the bank was mulling the possibility of launching its second China-based branch in Qingdao, Shandong Province, where many Taiwanese businesses have also made investments, should the weather pose no difficulty to employees.
“We will facilitate a greater China platform to serve Taiwanese businesses, linking our China-based outlets, offshore units and branches in Hong Kong and Singapore,” he said.
Land Bank yesterday posted NT$8.17 billion (NT$254.56 million) in net income for last year, up 8.4 percent year-on-year, or NT$3.25 per share.
Wang said the bank vowed to maintain its earnings per share at above NT$1.5 for this year after its working capital was doubled to NT$50 billion earlier.
The bank yesterday touted its robust performance in syndicated loan businesses after it arranged US$2.5 billion in outstanding syndicated loans to Taiwanese businesses last year — the largest in Taiwan.
In Asia, the bank also arranged US$2.35 billion in outstanding syndicated loans — the 10th largest after Standard Chartered Bank and RBS.
At the end of November, the bank claimed to be the largest domestic mortgage lender with NT$635.4 billion in outstanding loans, or an 11.17 percent market share, Wang said.
“We don’t think there are bubbles in the domestic real-estate market because only high-end properties have seen price hikes,” he said, adding that his bank expects to see steady growth in mortgage lending.
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
RESPONSE: The Japanese Ministry of Finance might have to intervene in the currency markets should the yen keep weakening toward the 160 level against the US dollar Japan’s chief currency official yesterday sent a warning on recent foreign exchange moves, after the yen weakened against the US dollar following Friday last week’s Bank of Japan (BOJ) decision. “We’re seeing one-directional, sudden moves especially after last week’s monetary policy meeting, so I’m deeply concerned,” Japanese Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Atsushi Mimura told reporters. “We’d like to take appropriate responses against excessive moves.” The central bank on Friday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years, but Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda chose to keep his options open rather than bolster the yen,
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS