Insurance companies should avoid unnecessary overseas travel by their employees to reduce the possibility of imported cases of COVID-19, the Financial Supervisory Commission’s (FSC) Insurance Bureau said yesterday.
The bureau on Sunday urged local life insurance and property insurance companies to prohibit their staff from unnecessary travel abroad and required companies to report to the bureau any travel-related activities, Insurance Bureau Deputy Director-General Wang Li-hui (王麗惠) said by telephone.
Chairs or general managers of insurance companies are required to report to the bureau in advance before starting business trips, with details including itineraries, anti-virus measures and others on the trips, Wang said.
Companies should make sure that family members or others who live with a staff member who travels overseas knows that the employee would need to remain at home for 14 days to fulfill self-health management requirements after returning, she said.
“We would not fine insurance companies if they fail to comply with this guidance, as there is no law allowing a penalty, but we think that insurance companies would be happy to follow this guidance, as they would not want to jeopardize their operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Wang said.
Moreover, if insurance company personnel have people they live with who want to travel, they might find it difficult to persuade them to cancel the trip, but they should report the situation to their company and make suitable arrangements, possibly including 14 days of self-quarantine, she said.
The announcement came after the nation confirmed its 54th COVID-19 case, a man in his 30s who visited Thailand and Japan and reportedly works for a foreign financial firm.
Cathay Life Insurance Co (國泰人壽) since last month has asked its staff to avoid trips to countries with a Level 3 “warning” travel notice.
The company yesterday said that it “strongly suggested” staff avoid unnecessary travel, spokesman Lin Chao-ting (林昭廷) said by telephone.
“We cannot ban them from overseas travel, as their rights are protected by the Constitution,” Lin said. “However, company management would ask for their reason for traveling and the leave would not be approved if it were deemed to be not necessary.”
STRONG INTEREST: Analysts have pointed to optimism in TSMC’s growth prospects in the artificial intelligence era as the cause of the rising number of shareholders The number of people holding shares of chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) hit a new high last week despite a decline in its stock price, the Taiwan Depository and Clearing Corp (TDCC, 台灣集保) said. The number of TSMC shareholders rose to 2.46 million as of Friday, up 75,536 from a week earlier, TDCC data showed. The stock price fell 1.34 percent during the same week to close at NT$1,840 (US$57.55). The decline in TSMC’s share price resulted from volatility in global tech stocks, driven by rising international crude oil prices as the war against Iran continues. Dealers said
PRICE HIKES: The war in the Middle East would not significantly disrupt supply in the short term, but semiconductor companies are facing price surges for materials Taiwan’s semiconductor companies are not facing imminent supply disruptions of essential chemicals or raw materials due to the war in the Middle East, but surges in material costs loom large, industry association SEMI Taiwan said yesterday. The association’s comments came amid growing concerns that supplies of helium and other key raw materials used in semiconductor production could become a choke point after Qatar shut down its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production and helium output earlier this month due to the conflict. Qatar is the second-largest LNG supplier in the world and accounts for about 33 percent of global helium output. Helium is
DOMESTIC COMPONENT: Huang identified several Taiwanese partners to be a key part of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin supply chain, including Asustek, Hon Hai and Wistron Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), addressing crowds at the company’s biggest annual event, unveiled a variety of new products while predicting that its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) processors would help generate US$1 trillion in sales through next year. During a two-and-a-half-hour keynote address, Huang announced plans to push deeper into central processing units (CPUs) — Intel Corp’s home turf — and introduced semiconductors made with technology acquired from start-up Groq Inc. The company even said it was developing chips for data centers in outer space. At the heart of Huang’s speech was the message that demand for computing power
China is clamping down on fertilizer exports to protect its domestic market, industry sources said, putting an additional strain on global markets that were already grappling with shortages caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran. China is among the largest fertilizer exporters — shipping more than US$13 billion of it last year — and it has a history of controlling exports to keep prices low for farmers. Shipments through the war-blocked Strait of Hormuz account for about one-third of the sea-borne supply. This month, Beijing banned exports of nitrogen-potassium fertilizer blends and certain phosphate varieties, sources said. The ban, which has not
RSS