The average monthly regular wage in October gained 2.63 percent from a year earlier to NT$46,455, while the average total monthly wage — including overtime pay, performance-based commissions and bonuses — increased 3.41 percent to NT$53,227, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The data represented a mild slowdown from September — when companies issued bonuses in observance of the Mid-Autumn Festival — but supported a continued improvement that beat inflation, Census Department Deputy Director Tan Wen-ling (譚文玲) said at a news conference in Taipei.
In the first 10 months of this year, the average real monthly wage and the average total monthly wage picked up 0.5 percent and 1.82 percent each to NT$46,371 and NT$61,529 respectively, after factoring in consumer price hikes for the same period, Tan said.
Photo: Hou Cheng-hsu, Taipei Times
Improving business underpinned the wage hikes as evidenced by the amount of overtime hours, which hit 24.3 hours per month at local makers of electronic components, the strongest in 51 years, she said.
“Chip demand from artificial intelligence [AI], high-performance computing and cloud services is gaining momentum without any signs of mitigation” she said.
Taiwan is home to the world’s major suppliers of advanced chips used in AI, she said.
Wage increases were most evident at financial institutes at 6 percent, followed by shipping and warehousing service providers at 3.58 percent and real-estate brokers at 3.36 percent, the DGBAS said.
The median wage — a better gauge of typical regular pay as it is not skewed by extremes of high or low wages — stood at NT$37,244, an increase of 2.88 percent from a year earlier, it said.
The monthly figure for workers with an undergraduate education was NT$39,277 and grew to NT$64,044 for workers with graduate diplomas, it said.
Male workers had higher median wages of NT$38,862 a month than female workers’ NT$35,183, it said.
People aged below 30 and above 65 had lower wages of NT$30,867 and NT$37,794 a month respectively, it said, citing a lack of experience for the former group and age for the latter.
Elsewhere, Kelvin Lau (劉建恆), senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong, yesterday said that the AI craze might continue to drive Taiwan’s GDP growth, which would reach 2.3 percent next year, from this year’s estimated 4.2 percent.
US technology giants have indicated plans to step up AI spending, which would benefit Taiwanese firms on the supply chain, he said during a video conference.
However, non-tech products would remain weighed, by an expected economic slowdown in the US, China and Europe, he said.
The upcoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump would raise tariffs on Chinese goods and indirectly affect Taiwanese firms, he said.
Taiwan’s strong trade surplus against the US could fuel tensions and it could seek appeasement by increasing purchases of agricultural products and military weapons from the US, he added.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS