New York Life Taiwan (紐約人壽) plans to recruit more than 3,000 agents from rival insurers who are about to be merged, beefing up its current 500-strong team, a top executive said yesterday.
“We would welcome the top 10 percent of those 30,000 to 40,000 [unemployed] agents, who are looking for a home,” Gary Bennett, chief executive officer of the life insurer in Greater China, told a media briefing.
Bennett said that New York Life was committed to the Taiwanese market, which contributed 16 percent to all revenues from Asia last year, and that it would weather the current tough times by strengthening its traditional policy businesses and building a multiple channel via agents, bancassurance and telemarketing.
Chief financial officer Steve Miles said the life insurer saw a 20 percent year-on-year growth in net profits last year in Taiwan. He said health insurance policies were the biggest growth driver, while the company had a strong 260 percent risk-based capital (RBC) ratio.
However, he refused to detail earning figures.
To show its commitment, the insurer announced it would boost its charity outreach programs that support disabled and disadvantaged children by sending employee volunteers to read and tell stories to children and by donating books to children’s groups nationwide in May.
New York Life Taiwan will also sponsor a children’s painting competition from March 16 to April 20 and donate NT$10 to the Maria Social Welfare Foundation for every painting submitted by a child.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained