Taiwan FSC starts looking into TSMC’s Morris Chang death rumor

January 16, 2014 Leave a comment

FSC starts looking into Morris Chang death rumor
Saturday, January 11, 2014
The China Post news staff

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Suspecting foul play, a top-level government securities regulator yesterday vowed to look into the rumored death of Morris Chang after stocks in Chang’s company stumbled on a day before yesterday.Promising results “shortly,” chairman of the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) Tseng Ming-chung (曾銘宗) said he was asking the Taiwan Stock Exchange Corporation (TWSE) to investigate allegations that investors went short on a certain stock on Thursday on unconfirmed news circulated on the Internet that Chang had died a day before.

The FSC will be involved in investigations should there be “major happenings” at major businesses, Tseng said, adding “being law-abiding” is one of his agency’s most important “administrative tasks” this year.

The stock in question might have been Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. (TSMC) shares, the price of which shed NT$3 per share before closing at NT$101 on Thursday. It managed to regain some lost ground yesterday, closing at NT$102.

Meanwhile, TWSE said it was aware of the “unusual” movements in the prices of TSMC stocks and the unusual number of shares that changed hands on Thursday and vowed to investigate whether certain funds had tried to fish in troubled water by attempting to manipulate stock prices.

Alive and kicking, the 83-year-old founder and chairman of TSMC yesterday sought to quiet doubts about his health with a public appearance, promising to “personally” preside over a Thursday, Jan. 16 briefing for institutional investors.

While Chang is no longer in charge of the company’s day-to-day running since Nov. 12, 2013 when the board of the world’s leading chipset foundry announced personnel appointments to succeed him as the company’s CEO, investors, especially those who own TSMC stocks, still look up to Chang as a stabilizing factor in and driving force behind the company’s growth.

‘Please Let Everybody Know That I am in Good Health’

“Please let everybody know that I am in good health by running a big, big picture of me,” Chang told reporters in Southern Taiwan on the sidelines of a national conference of college presidents, seeking to dispel the rumors.

Chang was a guest speaker at the conference, where he delivered a talk on the training of qualified and talented people.

All news about my ill-health is just unfounded hearsay, he said, adding he will gradually hand over his authority and responsibilities to Mark Liu (劉德音) and C. C. Wei (魏哲家), TSMC’s current co-CEOs whom Chang handpicked to succeed him, in the next few years.

The two men originally expected to preside over the Thursday briefing, however, did not openly comment on Chang’s health and fluctuations in TSMC stock prices yesterday.

Chang, while sharing the stage with the two co-CEOs and a couple of top TSMC officials on Thursday, will address such issues as capital expenditure, personnel changes and development of TSMC’s 20nm process technology, which, according to analysts, is indispensable to the company’s effort at further increasing its revenues.

Chang also is expected to answer questions raised by institutional investors.

According to CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, TSMC sales revenues for the next quarter are expected to increase by 20 percent over the current quarter.

Filed under Macro Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment