Evidence of how hard it is to land a job in the recession is showing up at a Taipei funeral home, which on Saturday hired 30 people to serve as apprentice morticians after receiving nearly 1,300 applications for the job.
Lien Fu-yu (連富玉), a human resources official at Lungyen Group (龍巖集團), said the number of applications this year was more than double last year’s 600, the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported yesterday.
The company first selected 127 candidates, all of them college graduates, to take written tests after a preliminary review of the 1,300 applicants.
ETIQUETTE
It dropped 69 candidates after the written test and required the remaining 58 to join a last round of interviews that was to test their etiquette and manners, the paper said.
The company pays a starting salary of NT$25,000 per month for an apprentice mortician, and raises it to NT$60,000 or NT$70,000 a year after the apprentice gains a full-time position.
Many of the candidates are less than 30 years old. Twenty-six-year-old Hsu Yu-lun (�?�) was one of the lucky 30.
She told the newspaper the salary was attractive and her family did not object to her working in the profession.
Hsu earlier worked in the financial services industry and recently finished a language study program in the US.
‘DEPARTURES’
Some candidates performed poorly on the final interview because they said they had not seen the Japanese film Departures and couldn’t answer questions related to necessary ceremonies and rituals, the Chinese-language United Daily News said.
Departures won the Best Foreign Language Film prize at this year’s Academy Awards on Feb. 22. The movies features an unemployed cellist who becomes an apprentice mortician, learning about life and death in the process.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
RATIONING: The proposal would give the Trump administration ample leverage to negotiate investments in the US as it decides how many chips to give each country US officials are debating a new regulatory framework for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) chips and are considering requiring foreign nations to invest in US AI data centers or security guarantees as a condition for granting exports of 200,000 chips or more, according to a document seen by Reuters. The rules are not yet final and could change. They would be the first attempt to regulate the flow of AI chips to US allies and partners since US President Donald Trump’s administration said it rescinded its predecessor’s so-called AI diffusion rules. Those rules sought to keep a significant amount of AI
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
RSS