One of Vietnam’s largest shoe manufacturers for brands such as Nike Inc and Adidas AG would cut thousands of jobs at the end of next month, blaming a slump in orders, Vietnamese state media reported on Saturday.
LOW DEMAND
The country is among the world’s largest exporters of clothing, footwear and furniture, but has been badly affected by the cost-of-living crisis in Europe and the US, with the buying power of consumers shrinking.
Photo: Reuters
PouYuen Vietnam Co, a unit of Taiwan-based Pou Chen Corp (寶成工業), told local authorities that it would lay off almost 6,000 workers with permanent contracts from the end of next month, VNExpress reported.
“This will be the biggest layoff since PouYuen started its operation in Ho Chi Minh City in 1996,” it said.
The firm is among the commercial capital’s largest employers, with about 50,000 workers.
PRIOR LAYOFFS
However, it made a similar move in February, letting go of almost 3,000 permanent staff, and a further 3,000 temporary employees did not have their contracts renewed.
A third of production facilities in the city experienced reduced workforce demand in the first quarter of this year, a survey by Ho Chi Minh City’s labor department showed.
The downturn mostly affected shoes, clothing, and construction industries, officials said.
PouYuen put 20,000 of its workers on paid leave in rotation last year.
RISING unemployment
More than 630,000 workers lost their jobs or had their hours cut in Vietnam last year, the Vietnamese Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs said.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS