Taiwan's Financial Industry to Post Record High Profits of NT$500B. This Year

Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) Chairman M. C. Tseng recently announced  Taiwan's financial industry this year is expected to post profits of NT$450-500 billion (US$15-16.67 billion) to be the highest on  record.

Tseng attributes such encouraging performance to mainly to the inclusion of the industry in the Free Economic Pilot Zones, which became effective in August of 2012 to avail all businesses in these zones  relaxed regulations, lower taxes and other preferential benefits.

Starting this year FSC has eased the restrictions on businesses operated by offshore banking units (OBUs), offshore securities units (OSU) and offshore insurance units (OIU), with such deregulations to also apply to  designated domestic banking units (DBUs), domestic securities units (DSUs) and domestic insurance units (DIUs) in 2015.

FSC's statistics show the pretax profits scored by the financial industry reached NT$388.4 billion (US$12.95 billion) in the first nine months, surging 54% year on year. Of the total, banking industry accounted for NT$261.8 billion (US$8.73 billion), insurance industry NT$100.4 billion (US$3.35 billion) and securities industry NT$26.1 billion (US$870 million).

This year the banking industry is estimated to score record high profits exceeding NT$300 billion (US$10 billion) and the securities industry's H1 profits surged an annual 98%. (JL)