The National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday that it will consider extending the three-year income tax reduction for foreign employees in the government-designed “free economic pilot zone” project to attract talent from abroad.
According to the draft proposal for the project, which is currently under review in the legislature, the government will cut half of income tax for foreign employees working in the zones during the first three years of their stay.
At a public hearing regarding the establishment of the “free economic pilot zones” yesterday, Jason Hsu (許祺昌), a tax expert with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Taiwan, said the government should extend the tax reduction period for foreign employees to encourage them to stay longer in Taiwan.
Biomedical professionals, most of whom are currently in China and the US, tend to stay in places where they can have the most after-tax disposable income, and the “free economic pilot zone” policy is likely to draw these people to Taiwan, Hsu said.
Vice Minister of Finance Wu Tang-chieh (吳當傑) said the ministry will evaluate the outcome of the three-year tax reduction measure before it agrees to extend the policy.
“We have to ascertain whether the measure is really attractive to talented people overseas, and whether the measure will reduce jobs for local people,” Wu said.
Jeffrey Huang (黃益豐), general-counsel of Taipei Computer Association, said the tax reduction policy would not reduce job opportunities for locals.
Local companies hire foreign employees because they want to make sure their products and business strategy are suitable for their target markets, Huang said, adding that local companies are not likely to offer these jobs to Taiwanese.
Meanwhile, asked about the negative impact of the “free economic pilot zone” policy on local agriculture, Council for Agriculture Deputy Minister Wang Cheng-teng (王政騰) said the possible impact would be small.
The government is to allow food-processing companies in the zones to import raw materials from China after the draft is passed, the council said.
The total output for Taiwan’s agricultural sector was NT$470 billion (US$12.55 billion) in 2012, with about NT$170 billion of the amount generated by agricultural products used for food processing, Wang said.
However, only 20 percent of the NT$170 billion generated by agricultural products used in food processing will be affected by the policy because 80 percent of the products are not likely to be substituted by products from abroad, Wang said.
The legislature’s Economic Committee decided yesterday that it will complete five public hearing for the pilot zone policy by April 14, before it starts reviewing the draft.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to