Evertrust Rehouse Group (永慶房產集團) on Thursday said it plans to raise wages for administrative personnel by up to 11 percent, as the local property market has shown signs of a rebound.
Evertrust chairman Sun Ching-yu (孫慶餘) said that the wage increases, which are expected to average 5 percent, are scheduled to take effect in March and would be doled out based on the performance of each employee.
Evertrust, which is offering pay hikes for the second time in three years, is the first real-estate agency in the nation to announce a wage increase amid the government’s call for employers to raise wages and offer entry-level pay of at least NT$30,000 per month.
Tu Chen-hung (塗振宏), a manager at Evertrust’s human resources department, said improving employees’ welfare is the foundation of their performance.
For its salespeople, the firm guarantees a base salary of NT$50,000 per month for their first nine months on the company’s payroll, he said.
As transactions of residential and commercial housing units in the nation’s six special municipalities last year rose about 12 percent, Tu said he expects the rebound will encourage more people to become real-estate agents.
Local rival Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) said that it already has a regular annual pay raise mechanism in place that will take effect in April, but added the details of this year’s raises have yet to be finalized.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained