China, India and Eastern Europe will increasingly take jobs away from the Western world's car workers over the next 10 years, as the automotive industry moves its parts-making operations from industrialized countries, the UN labor agency said Friday.
Factories in Japan, the US and Western Europe are becoming assemblers of finished cars from parts made in other countries, where labor costs are a fraction of those in the West, said the International Labor Organization in a 144-page study.
"The increasing importance of suppliers will benefit emerging markets, particularly Central and Eastern Europe, China and India, allowing them to increase their share of global components production," the report said.
Auto industry jobs will fall or stagnate in the big three auto-producing regions, but China's employment in the sector will rise 156 percent by 2015 and its workers producing auto parts will more than triple, the report said.
"The potential for companies in advanced countries to lower labor costs by outsourcing, coupled with the pressure to continuously reduce costs," means that the developing world is "where it is almost certain that employment in future years will increase the most," ILO said.
Many Western automobile producers "have begun to treat Chinese component costs as the global benchmark for their suppliers elsewhere," where auto-industry workers make anywhere from US$0.60 to US$1.30 an hour, ILO said.
Wages in the United States are up to 25 times higher.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
Taiwanese suppliers to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, 台積電) are expected to follow the contract chipmaker’s step to invest in the US, but their relocation may be seven to eight years away, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. When asked by opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Niu Hsu-ting (牛煦庭) in the legislature about growing concerns that TSMC’s huge investments in the US will prompt its suppliers to follow suit, Kuo said based on the chipmaker’s current limited production volume, it is unlikely to lead its supply chain to go there for now. “Unless TSMC completes its planned six
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Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said second-quarter revenue is expected to surpass the first quarter, which rose 30 percent year-on-year to NT$118.92 billion (US$3.71 billion). Revenue this quarter is likely to grow, as US clients have front-loaded orders ahead of US President Donald Trump’s planned tariffs on Taiwanese goods, Delta chairman Ping Cheng (鄭平) said at an earnings conference in Taipei, referring to the 90-day pause in tariff implementation Trump announced on April 9. While situations in the third and fourth quarters remain unclear, “We will not halt our long-term deployments and do not plan to