Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控) yesterday dismissed speculation that its bid to acquire smaller rival Jih Sun Financial Holding Co (日盛金控) is aimed at helping a Chinese shareholder dispose of his assets for cash.
Fubon Financial said in a statement that before it announced a tender offer on Friday to acquire Jih Sun, it had never made any contact with either of Jih Sun’s two majority shareholders — Japan’s Shinsei Bank and Hong Kong-based Capital Target Ltd (建群投資).
Capital Target is reportedly owned by Chinese tycoon Xiao Jianhua (肖建華), head of the Chinese conglomerate Tomorrow Holding Ltd (明天控股).
Photo: Lin Cheng-kun, Taipei Times
The financial terms of the acquisition deal are fair to all Jih Sun shareholders, no matter whether they are majority or minority shareholders, Fubon Financial said, assuring that the acquisition process would be transparent.
Earlier, local media cited Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Kao Chia-yu (高嘉瑜) as saying she suspected that Fubon Financial’s buy-in deal was planned to help Xiao dispose of his assets by transferring his stake in Jih Sun from Capital Target to Fubon Financial.
Kao said that as Fubon Financial has considerable investments in China, the company would have no choice but to yield to pressure from China.
She has asked the Financial Supervisory Commission to investigate whether Capital Target is backed by Chinese funding.
Local Chinese-language media have reported that Shinsei Bank and Capital Target own 35.49 percent and 24.09 percent stakes in Jih Sun respectively.
Fubon Financial said that the acquisition has nothing to do with Tomorrow Holding, adding that even if the company wanted to help Tomorrow Holding dispose of its assets for cash, it would have simply bought it directly instead of via Jih Sun through a tender offer.
Fubon Financial also said the largest shareholder of Xiamen City Commercial Bank (廈門商銀), in which the company has invested, is China’s Xiamen city government, and the largest shareholder of China’s Harbin Bank (哈爾濱銀行), in which Fubon Financial’s wholly owned subsidiary Fubon Life Insurance Co (富邦人壽) has a stake, is the Harbin city government, so its investments in China are irrelevant to Tomorrow Holding.
Under the tender offer, Fubon Financial would acquire a 50.01 percent stake in Jih Sun for NT$24.53 billion (US$860 million), or NT$13 per share.
The offer has been approved by the commission and must be completed before Feb. 1.
If the tender offer to buy a minimum stake of 50 percent in Jih Sun proceeds, Fubon Financial aims to try to acquire the remaining stake to bring its rival completely under its corporate umbrella.
The total cost of the deal would be about NT$49 billion.
TECH BOOST: New TSMC wafer fabs in Arizona are to dramatically improve US advanced chip production, a report by market research firm TrendForce said With Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) pouring large funds into Arizona, the US is expected to see an improvement in its status to become the second-largest maker of advanced semiconductors in 2027, Taipei-based market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said in a report last week. TrendForce estimates the US would account for a 21 percent share in the global advanced integrated circuit (IC) production market by 2027, sharply up from the current 9 percent, as TSMC is investing US$65 billion to build three wafer fabs in Arizona, the report said. TrendForce defined the advanced chipmaking processes as the 7-nanometer process or more
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip in the first quarter of next year, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to US restrictions, two people familiar with the matter said. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C — its newest chip, meant to rival those made by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp — to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. The 910C is being made by top Chinese contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) on its N+2 process, but a lack
NVIDIA PLATFORM: Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and a Taiwan site is to enter production next month, Nvidia wrote on its blog Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, yesterday said it is expanding production capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) servers based on Nvidia Corp’s Blackwell chips in Taiwan, the US and Mexico to cope with rising demand. Hon Hai’s new AI-enabled factories are to use Nvidia’s Omnivores platform to create 3D digital twins to plan and simulate automated production lines at a factory in Hsinchu, the company said in a statement. Nvidia’s Omnivores platform is for developing industrial AI simulation applications and helps bring facilities online faster. Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and the
Who would not want a social media audience that grows without new content? During the three years she paused production of her short do-it-yourself (DIY) farmer’s lifestyle videos, Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi (李子柒), 34, has seen her YouTube subscribers increase to 20.2 million from about 14 million. While YouTube is banned in China, her fan base there — although not the size of YouTube’s MrBeast, who has 330 million subscribers — is close to 100 million across the country’s social media platforms Douyin (抖音), Sina Weibo (新浪微博) and Xiaohongshu (小紅書). When Li finally released new videos last week — ending what has
RSS