The nation’s listed companies are required to reveal the average wage of their non-managerial employees by June next year, Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said yesterday.
The new regulations aim to improve listed firms’ corporate governance and transparency, Koo told a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Finance Committee.
Listed firms until this year had to disclose the average of total employees’ benefits in each year’s financial statements at the end of March. The benefits include wages, pensions, and labor and health insurances.
However, Securities and Futures Bureau Deputy Director Sam Chang (張振山) said listed firms need to focus on non-managerial employees and calculate three sets of data to be reported: their averaged benefits and wages, as well as earnings per share.
“Managers usually receive higher salaries, and if they are included, the average wage would be far higher than grassroots-level employees’ average wage, which the commission is trying to monitor,” Chang told a news conference.
The 1,684 listed firms in Taiwan — 919 trading on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) and 765 on the Taipei Exchange (TPEX) — would have to report the three numbers in the Market Observation Post System (MOPS) by June next year, and add median benefits and wages in their MOPS and financial statements by June 2020, the commission said.
The TWSE and TPEX would calculate average wages and average EPS among listed firms by industry, so the public could see the difference, the commission said.
If a company’s average annual wage remains below NT$500,000, a much-watched level by the Ministry of Labor, the firm would need to explain the results via MOPS, it said.
If a company shows growth in its EPS alongside declines in average wages — a scenario the commission said would be “weird” — or its EPS outperforms rivals, but average wages go down, it would also need to explain the situation, it said.
“We expect that workers will be able to check the information to understand firms better, even using the data to fight for benefits, while we also expect corporations to improve if they see that their wages are unreasonably lower than their peers,” a commission official surnamed Kuo (郭) told the Taipei Times by telephone.
Companies that refuse to reveal the numbers could be fined NT$240,000 to NT$2.4 million (US$7,817 to US$78,171), rising to NT$4.8 million after the Securities and Exchange Act (證交法) is amended, the commission said.
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
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by