Smartphone maker HTC Corp (宏達電) yesterday denied a local newspaper report that it is axing some of its temporary jobs in Taiwan in response to the company’s falling market share and earnings.
“The market speculation of job cuts at HTC is untrue,” chief financial officer and spokesman Chang Chia-lin (張嘉臨) said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
The report, printed by the Chinese-language United Evening News on Friday without cited sources, said the Taoyuan-based company has terminated some temporary jobs at its domestic plants and restructured its overseas offices and research centers.
On that same day, HTC reported its second-quarter net profit fell 57.77 percent from a year earlier to NT$7.4 billion (US$247.3 million), or earnings per share of NT$8.9, while consolidated revenue in the April to June period was NT$91 billion, falling 26.85 percent from the year before.
Contradicting market rumors that HTC is slashing temporary jobs to cope with its sagging sales, the world’s No. 5 smartphone vendor said the cuts were just the firm’s response to short-term workforce demand and not indicative of anything unusual.
“The company is not renewing contracts with workers when their contracts expire,” Chang said in the filing, denying layoff speculation.
At the height of its smartphone business, HTC expanded its global reach and increased its research and development centers in the US.
However, the company is facing intensified competition from Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, while its weakening position in overseas markets is forcing the Taiwanese company to rethink its global strategy.
“To improve operational efficiency and enhance core competitiveness, HTC is undergoing organizational restructuring and workforce adjustment at its offices in Brazil and in North Carolina, the US,” HTC said in the filing yesterday.
The company closed its office in Brazil last month, affecting 30 employees in Sao Paulo, and wound down a research and development center in Durham, North Carolina, which eliminated about 50 jobs.
On Friday, Citigroup Global Markets analysts Kevin Chang (張凱偉) and Jonathan Gu (古嘉元) said in a note that HTC would face further market share erosion and more headwinds to its earnings prospects in the second half of the year because of the release of Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone and the planned new iPhone from Apple.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the