People in Taiwan owned 5,7 ATM cards on average as of the end of November 2005, which was more than 10 times the level in 1991, when each person owned only 0,5 ATM cards on average, according to a report released by the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics.

There were 24,000 ATMs around Taiwan as of the end of last November, up 13.2 percent from the year-earlier level. The figure represented 1,055 ATMs per million people, compared with 150 ATMs per million people in 1991, the report said.

Local financial institutions had issued 130 million ATM cards as of the end of last November, an increase of 17.5 percent from the same period of the previous year. A total of 73.37 million of the cards were in circulation, accounting for 56.5 percent of the cards issued.( TaiwanNews )