State-run companies' year-end bonuses for this year will not be revealed until May, but an official said aside from the the debt-ridden Aerospace Industrial Devel-opment Corp (漢翔航空), employees in six other firms are expected to receive slight increases in their year-end bonuses from last year.
The other six companies include Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電), Tang Eng Iron Works Corp (唐榮), Taiwan Sugar Corp (台糖), Chinese Petroleum Corp (
Generally, staff of each company will be awarded at least 2-months' salary as their year-end bonuses, said Hu Wen-chung (
Aerospace Industrial, which handed out only 2.04-month's salary of year-end bonuses last year, reported a deficit of NT$270 million for the first half of this year, according to the commission's statistics. The company's debt amounted to NT$16.33 billion as of the end of last year, the data shows.
Taisugar, another money-losing company that saw a loss of NT$960 million in pre-tax revenues in the first half of the year, may still gain a slight rise in year-end bonuses as the company earned some money from selling land, Hu said.
As for the money-making firms in the sector, Taipower reported NT$31.3 billion in pre-tax revenues last year, increasing from NT$23.66 billion in the previous year. Taipower also made itself the most profitable state-run company by raking in NT$5.68 billion in pre-tax profits for the first half of this year, an increase of NT$4.63 billion from a goal set by the government for the year.
Taipower employees, along with Taiwan Salt Co (Taisalt,
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
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],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day