Companies including JPMorgan Chase & Co are stepping up to compensate employees ensnared by Hong Kong’s strict quarantine regime, as businesses in the territory struggle to retain and recruit staff almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic.
As most of the rest of the world is opening up — including rival financial hubs such as Singapore, London and New York — Hong Kong is steadfast in its “COVID-zero” approach, which includes mandating a hotel quarantine of up to three weeks for residents and visitors.
A stay at Hong Kong’s quarantine hotel can cost between HK$500 and HK$3,630 (US$64 and US$465) per night for a non-suite room.
JPMorgan has offered to reimburse Hong Kong employees up to US$5,000 to compensate for their quarantine stay, in a plan that would remain in effect until November next year.
All Hong Kong-based staff members who are executive directors and below could claim the amount for a single quarantine stay for personal trips to visit immediate family members, which includes spouses, domestic partners, children, parents and grandparents.
The US bank has 4,000 employees in the territory.
The New York-based Morgan Stanley has offered employees as much as HK$40,000 to cover quarantine costs. The one-time reimbursement would be available to all Hong Kong permanent employees when they return from a personal trip to visit immediate family members and in effect until November next year.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc has offered employees in the Asia-Pacific region a one-time subsidy of up to US$5,000 to cover costs from a mandatory quarantine effective Dec. 1, a company memo showed.
A Hong Kong-based spokeswoman confirmed the content of the memo.
The subsidy is in recognition that staff members in the Asia-Pacific region have faced the “additional burden of multiple lockdowns and some of the strictest quarantine measures in the world,” the memo said.
Hong Kong needs to achieve a vaccination rate of at least 80 percent before it would consider reopening its borders to mainland China and the international community thereafter, The Standard reported, citing a top government official.
About 70.2 percent of the territory’s population has received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, while only 17 percent of older people aged 80 or older have been inoculated, the newspaper quoted Hong Kong Secretary for the Civil Service Patrick Nip (聶德權) as saying in a radio interview on Saturday.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained