The number of workers hired by the industrial and service sectors grew slightly in June as the number of COVID-19 cases fell, but year-to-date take-home pay remained in negative territory after inflation, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
Average take-home pay rose 4.03 percent from a year earlier to NT$44,324 per month, while total wages — including overtime compensation, commission and bonuses — increased 3.59 percent to NT$53,068, data from the statistics agency showed.
The pace at which the average monthly wage has grown has exceeded 2 percent for nine straight months, reflecting improving corporate profitability, DGBAS Census Department Deputy Director Chen Hui-hsin (陳惠欣) said.
Photo: Clare Cheng, Taipei Times
Headline take-home pay in the first six months of the year climbed by a 22-year record of 3.02 percent to NT$44,262, but contracted 0.11 percent from a year earlier after an inflation rate of 3.13 percent was factored in for the period, Chen said.
A global economic recovery, and spiking energy and raw material prices have pushed consumer prices above 3 percent since March and wiped out real wage growth, she said.
The pace of the retreat is the second-worst recorded after 2.86 percent at the height of the global financial crisis in 2009, Chen said.
However, it has shown signs that it could be decelerating, as it dropped 0.2 percent from a month earlier after international crude prices lost some momentum amid rising economic uncertainty, she added.
Altogether, Taiwan has witnessed nine periods of negative wage growth in the past 21 years, Chen said.
While inflation ate away at wages, the latest payroll data showed that the job market is gradually emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.
The accession rate — the number of new employees added to payrolls — was 2.34 percent, rising 0.18 percentage points from a month earlier as businesses regained some confidence, the DGBAS said.
The exit rate rose 0.06 percentage points to 2.33 percent.
The number of workers expanded by 1,000, or 0.01 percent, to 8.14 million. The increase came as daily COVID-19 cases declined, enabling retailers and wholesale operators to hire 3,000 more staffers, the agency said.
However, restaurants and hotels shed 5,000 staff in June, slowing from 10,000 in May, Chen said.
Manufacturing sectors hired 8,000 more workers, with suppliers of electronic components accounting for 3,000 of them, the DGBAS said.
The employment figures for last month are expected to improve further, as the government introduced a new travel subsidy to shore up domestic tourism and consumer spending as a whole, it said.
NXP Semiconductors NV expects its first automotive-grade 5-nanometer chip built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to become available for automakers within one-and-a-half years at the earliest, following demand for better computing performance and energy efficiency for connected vehicles, a company executive said yesterday. That would mean a significant upgrade from the 16-nanometer technology NXP adopted in its existing series of microprocessors. NXP chief technology executive Lars Reger made the remarks during a media briefing yesterday in Taipei. The latest updates came after NXP unveiled its plan to source 5-nanometer capacity from TSMC in 2021. This is Reger’s first trip to
AI TREND: TSMC has been rapidly expanding capacity to meet a spike in demand for advanced packaging services, but still expects supplies to be tight for 18 months Arizona is in talks with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) about advanced chip packaging, state Governor Katie Hobbs said yesterday, which is crucial for the manufacturing of artificial intelligence (AI) chips. TSMC, which is building a US$40 billion chip factory in the US state, has not announced plans to build facilities for advanced chip packaging in the US. Advanced packaging processes stitch multiple chips together into a single device, lowering the added cost of more powerful computing. “Part of our efforts at building the semiconductor ecosystem is focusing on advanced packaging, so we have several things in the works around that
The European Commission’s digital chief yesterday said that murky Chinese laws were fueling concerns among foreign firms in the country, following discussions with Beijing officials about critical areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data governance. Vera Jourova, who is also the commission’s vice president, made the comments after meeting on Monday with Chinese counterparts including Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing (張國清) in the second “High-level Digital Dialogue” between the two sides. Among the concerns Jourova said she had heard about from European businesses in China was the “unpredictability of the decisions and interpretation of the laws by the regulators.” Beijing has recently implemented
EVADING US CONTROLS? ‘These surveillance chips are relatively easy to manufacture compared to smartphone processors,’ a source said about HiSilicon’s components A Huawei Technologies Co (華為) unit is shipping new Chinese-made chips for surveillance cameras in a fresh sign that the Chinese tech giant is finding ways around four years of US export controls, two sources briefed on the unit’s efforts said. The shipments to surveillance camera manufacturers from the company’s chip design unit, HiSilicon Technologies Co (海思半導體), started this year, said one of the sources and a third source familiar with the industry supply chain. One of the sources briefed on the unit said that at least some of the customers were Chinese. Huawei unveiled new smartphones in the past few weeks that
RSS