The unemployment rate dropped to 3.66 percent last month, the lowest in 24 months as fewer people lost their jobs to downsizing or closures, despite a modest gain in the number of people who quit their job, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said in a report yesterday.
The figure might take a mild upturn this month and climb higher through the summer vacation due to new graduates and part-time workers entering the jobs market, the DGBAS said.
“Firms in different sectors keep payrolls steady amid a stable economy,” DGBAS Deputy Director Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) said at a news conference in Taipei.
The situation might continue to improve with the advent of the high-sales season for electronics components, Pan said.
Global technology brands tend to launch new products in the autumn, benefiting electronics components makers in their global supply chain.
Taiwan is home to the world’s major contract chipmakers, chip designers and suppliers of camera lenses, touch panels and other devices used in smartphones, laptops, and Internet of Things applications.
The jobless rate after seasonal adjustment stood at 3.79 percent, up 0.01 percentage points from a month earlier, the DGBAS report said.
There were 431,000 people unemployed, a decrease of 1,000 compared with April, the report said.
The number of people who lost their jobs to downsizing, closures and temporary hiring dropped by about 1,000 each, while the number of people who resigned rose by 1,000, it said.
Unemployment was highest among people with a university degree or higher (4.47 percent), followed by people with a “junior college” education (3.92 percent) and people with a high-school education (3.7 percent). The rate was lowest among people who only finished junior-high school (2.85 percent), the report said.
By demographic breakdown, people in the 15-to-24 age bracket had the highest unemployment rate (11.49 percent), followed by the 25-to-29 group (6.53 percent), the report said.
For the first five months, the jobless rate averaged 3.75 percent, lower than 3.88 percent in the same period last year, it said.
In related news, total monthly wages — including take-home salaries, bonuses and overtime pay — averaged NT$44,359 (US$1,457) in April, a 1.83 percent increase from the same month last year, the DGBAS said in a separate report.
Regular take-home wages averaged NT$39,826 in April, a 1.49 percent gain from a year earlier, the report showed.
For the first four months of the year, the headline monthly take-home wage rose 1.55 percent to a record NT$39,662, it said, adding that the real increase eased to 0.94 percent after factoring in 0.6 percent inflation.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The chipmaker last month raised its capital spending by 28 percent for this year to NT$32 billion from a previous estimate of NT$25 billion Contract chipmaker Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (力積電子) yesterday launched a new 12-inch fab, tapping into advanced chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging technology to support rising demand for artificial intelligence (AI) devices. Powerchip is to offer interposers, one of three parts in CoWoS packaging technology, with shipments scheduled for the second half of this year, Powerchip chairman Frank Huang (黃崇仁) told reporters on the sidelines of a fab inauguration ceremony in the Tongluo Science Park (銅鑼科學園區) in Miaoli County yesterday. “We are working with customers to supply CoWoS-related business, utilizing part of this new fab’s capacity,” Huang said, adding that Powerchip intended to bridge
Microsoft Corp yesterday said that it would create Thailand’s first data center region to boost cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, promising AI training to more than 100,000 people to develop tech. Bangkok is a key economic player in Southeast Asia, but it has lagged behind Indonesia and Singapore when it comes to the tech industry. Thailand has an “incredible opportunity to build a digital-first, AI-powered future,” Microsoft chairman and chief executive officer Satya Nadella said at an event in Bangkok. Data center regions are physical locations that store computing infrastructure, allowing secure and reliable access to cloud platforms. The global embrace of AI
Qualcomm Inc, the world’s biggest seller of smartphone processors, gave an upbeat forecast for sales and profit in the current period, suggesting demand for handsets is increasing after a two-year slump. Revenue in the three months ended in June will be US$8.8 billion to US$9.6 billion, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Excluding certain items, earnings will be US$2.15 to US$2.35 a share. Analysts had projected sales of US$9.08 billion and earnings of US$2.16 a share. The outlook signals that the smartphone market has begun to bounce back, tracking with Qualcomm’s forecast that demand would gradually recover this year. The San