Taiwanese employers remain positive about staffing demand in the third quarter of this year, with the nation reporting the second-best job prospects in the Asia-Pacific region and the third-strongest in the world, a report released yesterday by Manpower Inc showed.
Of the 1,126 employers polled this month, 42 percent said they would increase their staff in the coming quarter, 3 percent planned to trim their headcounts and 53 percent expected to maintain their current payrolls, the Milwaukee-based employment services provider said in the report.
The latest Manpower Employment Outlook Survey indicated that next quarter would offer the most promising hiring environment in Taiwan since the second quarter of 2005, when the poll began.
This can be gauged by the employment agency’s “net employment outlook” figure — calculated by subtracting the number of employers planning to reduce staffing levels from the number planning to hire workers — which stands at a strong 39 percent for the three months ending Sept. 30, up 4 percentage points from the current quarter and 27 percentage points higher than a year ago.
After seasonal adjustment, the nation’s net employment score stands at 35 percent for the coming quarter, which also makes Taiwan the third-highest in the world, following India’s 42 percent and Brazil’s 40 percent, the report said.
Globally, Manpower said employers in 31 of 36 economies expected positive hiring activity in the third quarter, four predicted personnel numbers would decline and one expects payrolls to stay unchanged.
In the Asia-Pacific region, job prospects remain strong in the quarter ahead and improvements are expected in each of the eight economies surveyed, with India, Taiwan and China appearing most promising in hiring, Manpower said.
“The survey results indicate that employers’ hiring confidence is restored,” Terence Liu (劉玿廷), general manager of Manpower Services (Taiwan) Co, said in an e-mailed statement. The unemployment rate dropped to 5.39 percent in April from 5.67 percent in the previous month, the government’s statistics bureau reported on May 24.
However, Liu stressed that a sustained and solid recovery in the job market would still depend on a fundamental improvement in the local business environment.
In terms of industry sectors, the quarterly report found Taiwanese employers in the manufacturing sector the most optimistic, with a net employment outlook figure of 45 percent, according to Manpower.
That was followed by the finance, insurance and real-estate sectors (39 percent) and the services sector (35 percent). In contrast, employers in the wholesale and retail trade sectors would have the weakest staffing demand, with employers reporting a net outlook figure of 26 percent.
“Taiwan’s labor market is still closely tied with talent supply,” Liu said.
As the nation’s economy has gradually recovered from last year’s recession, employers are looking to recruit people who are not only equipped with specific skills, but can also make a contribution to their company in the shortest time, Liu said.
“However, finding talent with these specific skills can be difficult, and employers will continue to be challenged with talent shortages,” he added.
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