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.
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
Australian singer Kylie Minogue says “nothing compares” to performing live, but becoming an international wine magnate in under six years has been quite a thrill for the Spinning Around star. Minogue launched her first own-label wine in 2020 in partnership with celebrity drinks expert Paul Schaafsma, starting with a basic rose but quickly expanding to include sparkling, no-alcohol and premium rose offerings. The actress and singer has since wracked up sales of around 25 million bottles, with her carefully branded products pitched at low-to mid-range prices in dozens of countries. Britain, Australia and the United States are the biggest markets. “Nothing compares to performing
AUSPICIOUS TIMING: Ostensibly looking to spike the guns of domestic rivals, ByteDance launched the upgrade to coincide with the Lunar New Year China’s ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) has rolled out its Doubao 2.0 model, an upgrade of the country’s most widely used artificial-intelligence (AI) app, the company announced on Saturday. ByteDance is one of several Chinese firms hoping to generate overseas and domestic buzz around its new AI models during the Lunar New Year holiday, which began yesterday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese partake in family gatherings in their hometowns. The company, like rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), was caught off-guard by DeepSeek’s (深度求索) meteoric rise to global fame during last year’s Spring Festival, when Silicon Valley and investors worldwide were
RSS