Shareholders of SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控) and King’s Town Bank (KTB, 京城銀行) yesterday approved a merger plan that could make SinoPac Taiwan’s seventh-largest financial conglomerate.
The companies signed a merger agreement in December last year according to which SinoPac would buy 100 percent of KTB shares for NT$60 billion (US$1.82 billion) through cash and share swaps.
Under the share swap, one common KTB share would trade for 1.15 SinoPac shares, the companies said.
Photo: Lee Chin-hui, Taipei Times
SinoPac Financial president Stanley Chu (朱士廷) has said the integration would enable SinoPac to serve more customers in southern Taiwan.
Most of Tainan-based KTB’s 66 branches are in Yunlin County, Chiayi County, Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung County, while most of SinoPac’s 125 branches are in northern Taiwan, Chu said.
KTB chairman Tai Chen-chih (戴誠志) has said he intends to retire and the lender’s vice chairman Tsai Chiung-ting (蔡炅廷) has said he is not interested in taking over.
Tai and Tsai would not join SinoPac’s boardroom following the completion of the one-year integration, as they prefer to be shareholders and trust SinoPac’s management to the board, Chu said.
SinoPac said would next seek approval from the Financial Supervisory Commission for the acquisition, even though the KTB workers’ union last week rejected its retention and compensation offers.
SinoPac earlier said it would retain all KTB employees for at least three years and would provide bonuses for those who choose to stay, especially banking professionals.
The premium linked to the buyout bid has fallen from 8.8 percent in December last year to 4.36 percent on Thursday last week, as a result of local share corrections, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
The merger would also make SinoPac’s banking arm Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行) the third-largest lender in Taiwan by measure of loans to small and medium-sized enterprises, SinoPac Financial said.
KTB focuses on commercial banking, while SinoPac is more specialized in institutional banking and serving firms with larger amounts of capital, Chu said.
KTB would auction off its capital leasing unit and liquidate its securities arm, as the former has a different business orientation from SinoPac’s capital leasing unit, the two sides said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) would not produce its most advanced technologies in the US next year, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the comment during an appearance at the legislature, hours after the chipmaker announced that it would invest an additional US$100 billion to expand its manufacturing operations in the US. Asked by Taiwan People’s Party Legislator-at-large Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷) if TSMC would allow its most advanced technologies, the yet-to-be-released 2-nanometer and 1.6-nanometer processes, to go to the US in the near term, Kuo denied it. TSMC recently opened its first US factory, which produces 4-nanometer
PROTECTION: The investigation, which takes aim at exporters such as Canada, Germany and Brazil, came days after Trump unveiled tariff hikes on steel and aluminum products US President Donald Trump on Saturday ordered a probe into potential tariffs on lumber imports — a move threatening to stoke trade tensions — while also pushing for a domestic supply boost. Trump signed an executive order instructing US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to begin an investigation “to determine the effects on the national security of imports of timber, lumber and their derivative products.” The study might result in new tariffs being imposed, which would pile on top of existing levies. The investigation takes aim at exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil, with White House officials earlier accusing these economies of
Teleperformance SE, the largest call-center operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) system that softens English-speaking Indian workers’ accents in real time in a move the company claims would make them more understandable. The technology, called accent translation, coupled with background noise cancelation, is being deployed in call centers in India, where workers provide customer support to some of Teleperformance’s international clients. The company provides outsourced customer support and content moderation to global companies including Apple Inc, ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) TikTok and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. “When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard
PROBE CONTINUES: Those accused falsely represented that the chips would not be transferred to a person other than the authorized end users, court papers said Singapore charged three men with fraud in a case local media have linked to the movement of Nvidia’s advanced chips from the city-state to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek (深度求索). The US is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model’s performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using US chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier. The Singapore case is part of a broader police investigation of 22 individuals and companies suspected of false representation, amid concerns that organized AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of nations such
RSS