The number of furloughed workers on formal unpaid leave programs in Taiwan rose over the past week, boosted by an increase in the manufacturing sector, the Ministry of Labor said yesterday.
The number of workers placed on furlough programs rose to 15,927 nationwide as of yesterday, up 981 from 14,946 on Tuesday last week, ministry data showed.
The manufacturing sector was the main contributor to the increase in the number of furloughed workers, Labor Conditions and Equal Employment Division deputy head Wang Chin-jung (王金蓉) said.
The number of furloughed workers in the manufacturing sector rose 458 to 7,389, the biggest hike among business sectors, Wang said.
The number of employers in the manufacturing sector implementing unpaid leave programs also rose by 78 to 2,133 over the past week.
The number of furloughed workers in the metal and mechanical industries rose by 387 to 3,907, Wang said.
A textile machinery maker has furloughed 60 to 300 employees at a time since September last year, before deciding to give employees an extra one to two days of unpaid leave this month, because its customers scaled back orders, Wang said.
Wang said that the number of furloughed workers in the manufacturing sector is closely related to customer orders, which have been affected by the international political and economic situation, such as the war in Ukraine.
Domestic demand-oriented sectors have been stable, including the support services sector, which primarily consists of travel agencies, and wholesale and retail businesses, Wang added.
Those industries only saw about 100 workers in small firms placed on unpaid leave over the past week, Wang said.
In the support services sector, the number of workers on unpaid leave increased to 5,329, from 5,225 a week earlier, and the number of employers implementing furlough programs rose from 1,045 to 1,061.
The number of furloughed workers in the retail and wholesale sector rose to 1,301, up 149 from a week earlier, and the number in the lodging, and food and beverage industry rose from 592 to 597.
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
RSS