The unemployment rate last month fell slightly to 3.67 percent, a 0.06 percentage points less than a month earlier, as fewer people quit or lost jobs due to downsizing or closures, the Directorate-General of Accounting, Budget and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
After seasonal adjustments, the rate shed 1 percentage point to 3.72 percent, affirming a stable job market, Census Department Deputy Director Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) told a media briefing.
The rate last month weakened from 0.04 to 0.12 percentage points for the past decade, and last year proved no exception, thanks to an increase in seasonal and temporary hiring before the year-end, Pan said.
For the whole of last year, the jobless rate stood at 3.73 percent, up 0.02 percentage points from a year earlier, as many local firms were affected by a US-China trade dispute, the effects of which began to show in the second half of 2018, Pan said.
Last month’s data suggested a jobless population of 439,000, a decline of 8,000 people from one month earlier, DGBAS said.
The number of first-time jobseekers shrank by 5,000, while the number of people who lost jobs to business downsizing or at the end of temporary hiring fell by 2,000 each, the agency’s monthly survey found.
As usual, restaurants and hospitality facilities added the most employees this time of the year to meet demand for corporate banquets and holiday celebrations, it said.
Unemployment was highest among people aged 20 to 24 (12.27 percent), followed by 15-to-19 (9.22 percent) and 25-to-29 (6.57 percent), it said.
By education level, university graduates had the highest unemployment rate at 5.3 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.51 percent and people with graduate degrees at 2.93 percent, the survey showed.
The average unemployment period was 24.4 weeks, 1.1 week longer than a month earlier, it said, adding that the duration extended by 1.5 weeks to 24.3 weeks for first-time jobseekers.
The number of people unemployed for longer than a year rose by 2,000 to 63,000, it said.
Taiwan’s unemployment rate is higher than that of South Korea (3.6 percent), Hong Kong (3.2 percent), Singapore (2.3 percent) and Japan (2.2 percent), but the nation beat them on GDP growth, it said.
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