Co-owners,

Say the words "Taiwanese company" and one name tends to jump out. It makes the chips inside your phone, your laptop, and increasingly the data centres training the world's AI. But the island that builds the world's semiconductors also has to bank, insure and invest for itself. And the company that does more of that than any other has been sitting in your index fund the whole time.

This week we drew Fubon Financial Holding.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns since inception in 1986 as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Founded in 1961 in Taipei. Holding company established in 2001. Listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (2881). Headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan.

A few key facts:

In 1961, a 32-year-old named Tsai Wan-tsai opened Taiwan's first privately owned insurance company in Taipei. Ten employees. A small office on Hengyang Road. The country around it was poor and only starting to industrialise.

Six decades later, his two sons run a group that touches almost everyone on the island. It sells life insurance and health cover. It runs one of Taiwan's biggest banks. It insures more cars and buildings than anyone else in the country. It owns a brokerage, an asset manager, a mobile network, an online shopping giant and a baseball team. The family built all of this the patient way, one licence and one acquisition at a time, and they were disciplined about it. When Taiwan passed a law in 2001 allowing financial holding companies, Fubon was among the very first to form one. When it wanted a bigger bank in 2002, it bought Taipei Bank. When it wanted more scale in securities, it spent years acquiring Jih Sun and, in 2022, pulled off the first ever merger of two financial holding companies in Taiwan's history.

Fubon is a holding company, which means the money is made in the parts underneath it. Four of them matter most.

Fubon Life is the engine. It sells life and savings policies to millions of Taiwanese and then invests the premiums, and it earned NT$62.65bn (~US$2.0bn) in 2025, more than any other life insurer in the country. Hold that thought, because the way it invests is where this week's story turns.

Taipei Fubon Bank is the branch on the corner. It lends to families and companies, runs the "Fubon+" app on millions of phones, and had its best year ever in 2025, earning NT$37.4bn (~US$1.2bn) and pushing new branches into Korea, Australia, Japan and India.

Fubon Insurance is the one you would notice if you drove in Taiwan. It has been the island's number one car-and-property insurer for 44 years straight, with roughly a quarter of the whole market. If a scooter is dinged in Taipei traffic, there is a good chance Fubon is paying for it.

Fubon Securities is the brokerage. In a buoyant 2025 stock market it cleared NT$10.59bn (~US$340m), a record since it opened in 1988.

Add the asset manager, which crossed NT$1 trillion under management in 2025, and you have something close to a one-stop shop for a Taiwanese person's entire financial life. The whole point of stitching them together is cross-selling: sell you a mortgage at the bank, then car insurance, then a savings policy, then a fund.

Regular readers will remember Bank Central Asia, the Indonesian bank controlled by the billionaire Hartono family from a few editions ago. Fubon is Taiwan's version of that story. The Tsai family sits at the centre of it, holding their stakes through a web of investment companies with names like Ming Dong and Dao Ying, with chairman Richard Tsai and his brother Daniel between them steering the group and much of what it owns.

There is a twist, though, and it is a good one. The single largest shareholder in Fubon is not the family at all. It is the Taipei City Government, with just over 13%, a leftover from that 2002 Taipei Bank deal. So the city that Fubon calls home is also its biggest individual owner, sitting alongside a founding family that controls the larger bloc between its various vehicles. For an index investor, it is a neat reminder of how tangled real-world ownership can be beneath the tidy line item in your fund.

Here is the part that makes Fubon more interesting than "big Asian financial group".

In 2024, Fubon had its best year ever, earning a record NT$150.8bn. In 2025, profit fell by about a fifth. Business was not the problem. The bank had a record year, the insurer grew, the brokerage set records of its own. The culprit was the currency.

Fubon Life sits on a mountain of premiums, and like most large Asian life insurers, it invests a big share of that money abroad, much of it in US dollar bonds. That is fine until your home currency suddenly gets stronger. In the spring of 2025, the New Taiwan dollar shot up in value, and all those overseas dollars were suddenly worth fewer Taiwanese dollars when translated home. The annual report says it plainly: profit fell "mainly due to an increase in foreign exchange losses."

Nothing was actually broken. The policies still sold, the loans still performed. But a currency move most people never noticed knocked a fifth off the reported profit of one of Taiwan's biggest companies. That is the nature of a life-insurance-led group. Its earnings ride on investment markets and exchange rates as much as on how many policies it writes, which is why the profit line can swing hard from one year, or even one quarter, to the next.

A few things a co-owner should keep in mind.

The earnings are lumpy, for exactly the reason above. Currency and markets can flatter one year and punish the next, so it is worth judging Fubon over a run of years rather than any single one.

The geography carries a risk that is impossible to ignore. This is a financial group concentrated in Taiwan, with more of it in mainland China through its banks there. Whatever your view on cross-strait tensions, that concentration is part of what you own.

And control sits with a founding family and a city government, so the shares that trade freely carry less say over how the group is run than the raw numbers might suggest.

None of this is hidden. It is simply the shape of the business.

For all the drama in a single year's profit, the through-line is patient compounding. A ten-person insurance office became the financial backbone of one of the world's most important economies, built by a family that preferred to buy and integrate rather than chase. When the headlines are all about Taiwan's chips, it is worth remembering that someone still has to insure the factory, bank the workers and invest their savings. Through your index fund, that someone is partly you.

Data and images sourced from the Fubon Financial Holding Annual Report 2025 and the Fubon Financial Holding Q1 Report 2026. Share price and market cap as of writing. 

We're building 90 Percent out in the open. Follow us on LinkedIn where we tease each week's company before it lands here.

Next week, we'll be looking at a company from North America.