Huga Optotech Inc (廣稼), a leading manufacturer of light-emitting diodes (LED), yesterday denied local media reports that it was sending workers on unpaid leave, saying it has encouraged employees to take annual leave and strengthened their training programs.
The clarification came after several local Chinese-language newspapers said the Greater Taichung-based company became Taiwan’s first technology firm to furlough workers to help cope with falling business.
“The reports of [our using] unpaid leave are inaccurate,” Huga said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
There are about 1,300 people on the LED maker’s payroll.
The company said it had struck an agreement with employees before asking them to take annual leave and increasing training hours.
Huga is yet another technology firm that has encouraged employees to schedule annual leave or enroll in training programs amid declining orders after the nation’s two top flat-panel makers, Chimei Innolux Corp (奇美電子) and AU Optronics Corp (友達光電), made similar moves earlier this week.
Founded in 1998, Huga rolled out its first LED chip in 2000 just as the global LED industry was taking off. The company saw tenfold growth between 2005 and 2007.
The company reported NT$104.06 million (US$3.43 million) in net losses during the first half of this year, reversing a net profit of NT$268.9 million a year earlier and translating into a net loss of NT$0.21 per share, company statistics showed.
Huga’s shares stayed flat at NT$14.8 yesterday, weaker than the TAIEX’s 0.14 percent gain, stock exchange data showed.
Meanwhile, MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the nation’s largest handset chip designer, is bucking the negative sentiment within the high-tech sector, as the company plans to recruit 300 software engineers in both Taiwan and China to meet product demand in the smartphone market, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported yesterday.
The newspaper, citing unnamed company officials, said MediaTek is targeting engineers in such fields as Android operating system, long term evolution (LTE) high-speed network, radio-frequency system, digital TV platform and 3D application programs.
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