A weekly snapshot of Taiwan business news stories brought to you by CommonWealth and AmCham Taiwan’s TOPICS FSC suspends shareholders’ meetings Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) announced on May 20 that the shareholders’ meetings of 1,931 public companies – including the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) – will be suspended from May 24 to June…
A proposed acquisition could be a turning point for Taiwan’s overbanked financial services industry. Last December, Fubon Financial Holdings, the second-largest financial services organization in Taiwan, announced that it was pursuing a hostile takeover of Jih Sun Financial Holdings through a public tender offer for at least 50% of the company’s shares. The offer is…
A bi-weekly snapshot of Taiwan business news stories brought to you by CommonWealth and AmCham Taiwan’s TOPICS NCC Approves APT-FET Deal Taiwan’s National Communications Commission (NCC) on March 3 approved local telecom operator Far EasTone’s (FET) application to share its 5G bandwidth on the 3.5GHz frequency band with Asia-Pacific Telecom (APT). As a condition of…
Ørsted & TSMC Ink Wind Deal Danish wind power company Ørsted and TSMC on July 8 signed a major renewables agreement, under which the Taiwan company would purchase the entire production of Ørsted’s third wind farm project in Taiwan. It is the world’s largest corporate power purchase agreement thus far. The deal indicates that industries…
Taiwan’s ranking by a money-laundering watchdog has risen over the past year, but future efforts will need to address challenges emerging from digitization of the financial sector. Taiwan has significantly strengthened its anti-money laundering regime in recent years, which has been reflected in its improved ranking by a key regional watchdog. In late 2019, the…
New York regulators’ fining of Mega Bank last year for lax compliance practices was a wake-up call. In a victory for the nation’s regulators, Taiwan in July was removed from a regional list of countries judged to have insufficient money-laundering controls. Taiwan had spent months revising legislation and pushing its financial institutions to crack down…
In the past year, positive steps have been taken by the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) to build a better business environment and stimulate financial product innovation in Taiwan. In the newly published 2017 Taiwan White Paper, the Asset Management Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei commends these reforms. The Asset Management Committee…
So far, regulators have been more concerned about the risks of financial innovation than the rewards. Financial industry observers see big potential for Taiwan in the nascent fintech sector, citing the ways in which emerging technologies could help the banking and insurance components of the nation’s financial conglomerates share information safely and efficiently. A special…
In January, outgoing Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) chairman William Ming-chung Tseng (now a member of the Legislative Yuan) highlighted the slow pace of consolidation in the banking sector as a major regret of his FSC tenure. When he was appointed head of the FSC in 2014, Tseng called for consolidation in a bid to streamline…
The Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp. is taking steps to improve board governance among listed companies. Cooking oil scandals, chemical pipeline explosions, pollution exposés – a common thread runs through these headline-grabbing incidents in Taiwan in 2014. Beyond the lamentable suffering and social costs, they represent avoidable destruction of shareholder value that could have been mitigated…
