Life insurance companies’ combined first-year premiums (FYP) fell for the ninth consecutive month last month due to a low interest rate environment and tougher regulations, a report released on Monday by the Life Insurance Association showed.
Total FYP plunged 10 percent year-on-year to NT$54.42 billion (US$1.88 billion), including NT$32.1 billion in FYP generated by traditional life insurance products and NT$22.2 billion derived from investment-linked policies, the report showed.
Last month’s fall was milder than the declines of 30 to 40 percent reported earlier this year, indicating stabilizing sales, the report said.
Investment-linked policies’ FYP rose 33 percent annually last month, as insurers launched new products to meet consumer demand for products that offer better returns than bank deposits, it said.
For the first nine months, cumulative FYP generated by investment-type policies totaled NT$137 billion, down 28 percent year-on-year, while traditional policies fell 30 percent to NT$467 billion.
Consumers were less interested in traditional life insurance policies after insurers stopped offering products with much higher returns to comply with a new regulation that took effect in July.
However, health insurance policies bucked the trend with a 12 percent rise in cumulative FYP to NT$32 billion during the January-to-September period, as people became more concerned about their health insurance coverage amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it said.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to