The average monthly take-home wage in March increased 1.56 percent from a year earlier to NT$42,309 (US$1,417), but restaurants, hotels and tourism-related companies cut payrolls to cope with sluggish business caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The latest wage data represented a 0.01 percent decrease from a month earlier, which bucked the seasonal trend for the first time in nearly 40 years, the agency said.
“March’s wages are surprisingly lower than those in February for the first time since 1981,” DGBAS Deputy Director Chen Hui-hsin (陳惠欣) told a news briefing in Taipei.
Chen attributed the change to the pandemic, which has diminished business for restaurants, hotels, travel agencies, retailers and transportation service providers.
In March, 19,000 jobs were lost compared with February, another seasonal twist not seen since the global financial crisis in 2008, Chen said.
Wage data for last month might look worse, as more firms introduced furloughs and pay cuts to make ends meet, Chen said.
As of Friday, 1,047 companies had furloughed 19,000 employees, mostly concentrated in service-oriented businesses and some machinery suppliers, Ministry of Labor data showed.
Take-home pay fell 3.67 percent for employees at travel agencies and shrank 2.99 percent at airlines, while restaurant and hotel workers reported pay reductions of 1.62 percent, the DGBAS report showed.
Machinery makers lowered wages by 1.22 percent and retailers posted a 1 percent drop, it said.
Still, take-home wages edged up from a year earlier because a sizable number of firms, especially in finance, in January increased pay for employees after the nation’s economy showed signs of recovery in the second half of last year, the agency said.
However, the pace of the increase is the slowest since May 2017.
State-run financial institutions have supported the government’s upward revisions of basic wages, the DGBAS said.
Total monthly wages — including overtime pay and bonuses — grew 2.84 percent year-on-year to NT$47,750 in March, it said.
Overall working hours stood at 174.6 hours, an increase of 9.1 hours from a year earlier as there were more working days this year.
For the first quarter, take-home pay increased 1.92 percent to NT$42,329 per month, while total wages climbed 0.82 percent to NT$65,497.
The rates of increase were 1.38 percent and 0.28 percent respectively after factoring in inflation, the agency said.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, surpassing the US$600 billion mark for the first time, the central bank said yesterday. Last month, the country’s foreign exchange reserves rose US$5.51 billion from a month earlier to reach US$602.94 billion due to an increase in returns from the central bank’s portfolio management, the movement of other foreign currencies in the portfolio against the US dollar and the bank’s efforts to smooth the volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民)said a rate cut cycle launched by the US Federal Reserve
Handset camera lens maker Largan Precision Co (大立光) on Sunday reported a 6.71 percent year-on-year decline in revenue for the third quarter, despite revenue last month hitting the highest level in 11 months. Third-quarter revenue was NT$17.68 billion (US$581.2 million), compared with NT$18.95 billion a year earlier, the company said in a statement. The figure was in line with Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co’s (元大投顧) forecast of NT$17.9 billion, but missed the market consensus estimate of NT$18.97 billion. The third-quarter revenue was a 51.44 percent increase from NT$11.67 billion in the second quarter, as the quarter is usually the peak
Nvidia Corp’s major server production partner Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) reported 10.99 percent year-on-year growth in quarterly sales, signaling healthy demand for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. Revenue totaled NT$2.06 trillion (US$67.72 billion) in the last quarter, in line with analysts’ projections, a company statement said. On a quarterly basis, revenue was up 14.47 percent. Hon Hai’s businesses cover four primary product segments: cloud and networking, smart consumer electronics, computing, and components and other products. Last quarter, “cloud and networking products delivered strong growth, components and other products demonstrated significant growth, while smart consumer electronics and computing products slightly declined,” compared with the
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
RSS