Compared to other traditional manufacturing segments, the auto-making sector is expected to cash in a big "red envelope" as an improved economy has eased consumers' caution about spending on luxury goods like new cars, an industry watcher said yesterday.
"Employees at Yulon Motor Co (
But among the above-mentioned four companies, Hotai Motor, the biggest car maker in Taiwan by vehicle sales, may give smaller bonuses, Tsai said.
Fat year-end bonuses are not expected to continue next year.
"Yulon, which has a big portion earnings form its Chinese units, will suffer a significant setback in earnings due to increasingly fierce competition in China," Tsai predicts.
Yulon may offer more than five-month's salary as year-end bonus this year because of better-than-expected earnings, said Wu Hsin-fa (吳新發), spokesman of Yulon Nissan Co (裕隆日產), a spin-off unit of Yulon Motor Co.
Yulon's first 10-month earnings jumped 86.72 percent to NT$7.53 billion, which nearly doubled its full-year per-tax earning target of NT$4 billion.
China Motor, a joint venture of Yulon Motor and Mitsubishi Motor Corp of Japan, however, said it is likely to keep the bonus payment similar to that of 2002 despite a jump in earnings from its Chinese joint venture Southeast Motor Corp (東南汽車).
"Our calculation base doesn't include earnings from non-core business," China Motor Spokesman Hsu Li-min (許利民) explained. China Motor workers received additional six-month's salary payment for year-end bonuses last year, according to Hsu.
Ford Lio Ho Motor (
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts