Taishin Financial Holding Co (台新金控) is seeking to improve its core businesses this quarter after net profit rose more than 50 percent year-on-year to NT$12.1 billion (US$374.27 million) in the first three quarters, or earnings per share of NT$0.85, the Taipei-based conglomerate said yesterday.
The results already beat its earnings per share for the whole of last year at NT$0.55, and profit momentum would continue this quarter, Taishin said.
“All subsidiaries have fared well so far, aided by lingering benefits from acquiring Prudential Life Insurance Co of Taiwan (保德信人壽), dividend income and trading gains,” Taishin Financial president Welch Lin (林維俊) told an online investors’ conference.
Photo: CNA
Taishin Financial benefited from recovering unrealized losses in the previous year, Lin added.
A restrictive monetary environment at home and abroad allowed its net interest margin to gather 4 basis points from 1.2 percent in June to 1.24 percent in September, while its interest spread widened from 1.28 percent to 1.29 percent, Taishin Financial data showed.
Net interest margin might moderate slightly and hover at about 1.22 percent this year due to funding cost hikes, and is consistent with a slowdown in the loan-to-deposit ratio that stood at a relatively high 71.8 percent in September, officials said.
Currency swap operations would generate similar earnings this quarter as last quarter, after the US Federal Reserve and Taiwan’s central bank held interest rates steady and extended the rate differences, officials said.
The wealth management business of Taishin International Bank (台新銀行), the conglomerate’s main profit driver, might grow by double-digit percentage points this year alongside a high single-digit percentage increase in credit card operations, bank president Oliver Shang (尚瑞強) said.
Loan demand this quarter might rise by a high-single percentage with equal contributions from individual and corporate customers, Shang said.
Taishin Financial has sold almost all of its shares in state-run Chang Hwa Commercial Bank (CHB, 彰化銀行) after it ditched a long-standing effort to acquire the bank to instead turn to the life insurance sector to expand its business.
“We now have only 0.1 percent of CHB shares,” Lin said.
Taishin Life Insurance Co (台新人壽) reported NT$21.4 billion of gross premiums in the first nine months, increasing its market share from 1.7 percent last year to 1.85 percent this year, company officials said, adding that bancassurance represented the largest sales channel.
The group is taking a hit from its investment in Diamond Biofund Inc (鑽石生技), the nation’s largest investment fund focused on the biomedical industry, but said it would take a wait-and-see approach on the fund, in line with investment rules.
Taishin Financial’s venture capital unit owns a board seat at Diamond Biofund and cannot offload its stake in the first two to four years of the fund’s listing.
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