EMPLOYMENT
Hiring outlook weakens
The hiring outlook for the fourth quarter of the year weakened amid rising uncertainty over the economy at a time of escalating trade friction between the US and China, a survey released by online 1111 Job Bank (1111人力銀行) on Wednesday last week showed. According to the survey, which was conducted from Aug. 23 to Tuesday last week and collected 838 valid questionnaires, 54.89 percent of the responding enterprises said they planned to launch recruitment campaigns in the fourth quarter, down 2.61 percent from a year earlier.
INTERNET
Industrial platform planned
Foxconn Industrial Internet Co Ltd (FII, 富士康工業互聯網) on Tuesday last week said it would work with NXP Semiconductors Ltd of the Netherlands on the development of an industrial Internet system. NXP has agreed to provide artificial intelligence technology and solutions to help FII set up an advanced industrial Internet platform, FII said. The companies would work together to build an industrial Internet ecosystem to help FII clients achieve smart production and management, it said.
APPAREL
Jacket supplier hits record
Leading down jacket supplier Quang Viet Enterprise Co (廣越) yesterday posted record-high sales of NT$2.2 billion (US$71.48 million) for last month, a 25.43 percent year-on-year increase from NT$1.76 billion thanks to peak season effects. The increase brought the company’s cumulative revenue in the first eight months to NT$8.01 billion, up 42.82 percent from NT$5.61 billion the previous year, it said in a statement, adding that orders have surged from major customers such as Adidas AG, Patagonia, Nike Inc, The North Face and Puma AG.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
Alphabet Inc CEO Sundar Pichai is deepening a push into enterprise software, signaling to investors at Google’s annual cloud conference that artificial intelligence (AI) agents — human-like digital assistants — are a lynchpin of its strategy to monetize AI. At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that started yesterday, Pichai and key Google executives aim to position the company’s AI tools as production-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers who are emerging as the industry’s most reliable revenue stream. Mountain View, California-based Google yesterday announced that it was unifying a set of AI products under the name “Gemini Enterprise.” Most notably, that involves rebranding and
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