The unemployment rate fell to 3.96 percent last month from 4.08 percent in August, a 0.28 percentage point decrease from the level recorded in September last year, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
Last month’s figure represents the lowest level posted for September in the past 14 years, the DGBAS said in its monthly report.
The result was in line with the agency’s expectations, following the peak period for university graduates to enter the job market, which often falls between June and August.
The number of people registered as unemployed decreased by 15,000 to 458,000 last month from a month earlier, with the number of first-time jobseekers failing to get an offer rising by 6,000 month-on-month, the report said.
For the first nine months of the year, the unemployment rate was 3.99 percent, marking its lowest level for the period since 2008 and indicating that the full-year jobless rate might be less than 4 percent, the DGBAS’ statistics showed.
“If the global economic recovery maintains its current steady pace, we may see a jobless rate of less than 4 percent for the whole year,” DGBAS Deputy Director Lo Yi-ling (羅怡玲) told a press conference.
Compared with the jobless rates in other major Asian economies, such as Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, Taiwan’s unemployment figures are still relatively worse, the statistics showed.
The report showed that average monthly wages in the industrial and service sectors climbed to NT$38,288 in August, a 1.77 percent increase from August last year.
In the first eight months, average monthly wages in the industrial and service sectors climbed to a record NT$38,076, up 5.35 percent from the previous year, the report said.
The overall average monthly wage, including bonuses and compensation, rose 4.53 percent to a new high of NT$49,043 in the January-to-August period, compared with the same period the previous year, statistics showed.
However, the increase in the average monthly wage was lower than the pace of the nation’s headline inflation reading.
After a correction for inflation — which climbed 1.63 percent year-on-year in the first eight months — the real average wage was NT$47,243, lower than the same period 15 years ago, according to the DGBAS report.
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