Curtain manufacturer and seller Nien Made Enterprise Co (億豐綜合工業) plans to hire about 700 more workers at its Cambodian plant this year as it aims to grow annual output by 10 to 15 percent.
The company plans to increase its workforce by about 17 percent annually to 4,800 employees in Cambodia at the end of this year, a company public relations official told the Taipei Times by telephone yesterday.
The increase in output is to meet growing demand, as the company’s sales in the US and Europe increased constantly in the first half of the year, the official said, adding that the growth is expected to continue into the second half.
“As a labor-intensive industry, we still need employees to pull strings after we introduced automation to our production lines,” the official said.
With the increase in workforce, the Cambodian factory, which mainly produces ready-made blinds, would operate independently this year without imported components from the firm’s plants in China, they said.
Cambodia late last year surpassed China to become the company’s largest production base, the official added.
“To avoid risks, such as tariffs from the US-China trade dispute, we have been investing in Myanmar in the past few years and we expect it to start contributing in 2021,” they said.
As of this month, the company’s products made in China have faced a tariff of 1 percent, which has had a limited effect, the official said, but added that if the situation worsens, the company would try to increase the output of high-added-value products at its Chinese plants.
The company reported record monthly revenue of NT$2.14 billion (US$68.92 million) for last month, an 8.92 percent increase from the prior month.
In the first six months of the year, revenue climbed 11.04 percent year-on-year from NT$10.24 billion to NT$11.37 billion, thanks to full utilization and growing sales of cordless products in the US, the company said.
The US remained its largest market, accounting for 78.74 percent of sales last year, followed by European countries, such as the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, at a combined 16.96 percent and Asian countries contributing the rest, it said.
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