Taiwan’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) last year reached record highs in quantity and employment, continuing their steady growth trajectory, an annual white paper released by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed yesterday.
The number of SMEs rose to 1.72 million last year, up 2.48 percent year-on-year, Small and Medium Enterprise and Startup Administration Secretary-General Jia-jin Lee (李佳瑾) said at a press conference to release the white paper.
SMEs accounted for 98.87 percent of all Taiwanese businesses last year, and the figure is expected to remain similar this year, Lee said.
Photo: Lin Jing-hua, Taipei Times
About 9.19 million Taiwanese worked at SMEs last year, up 0.29 percent from the previous year, making up 79.29 percent of the nation’s total workforce, hitting a record high, Lee said.
Overall sales generated by SMEs last year grew 8.05 percent year-on-year to NT$31.1 trillion (US$988.7 billion), accounting for 51.99 percent of all business revenue, Lee said.
Domestic sales accounted for 90.27 percent of SMEs’ total sales last year, while export sales made up 9.73 percent, indicating that domestic demand remains a key growth driver for these enterprises, she said. Eighty percent of the nation’s SMEs were in the service industry last year, 44.79 percent of which were wholesalers or retailers, the report found.
SMEs in the industrial sector accounted for 19.08 percent of the total, it said.
It was the first time the paper included an SME operations survey, which showed that the most urgent needs for SMEs were funding support, including tax deductions or deferrals and financial assistance, Lee said.
Last year, 1,366 enterprises applied for tax reductions related to research and development investment, the issuance of new shares in exchange for intellectual property, increased hiring and wage increases, based on the Act for Development of Small and Medium Enterprises (中小企業發展條例), Lee said.
She said 827 employees were newly hired, while 31,769 workers received pay raises.
The ministry offered credit guarantees for loans to SMEs that raised wages, with a cap of NT$35 million per borrower, Lee said.
A total of 2,787 companies applied for the loans, totaling NT$8.23 billion, with an average wage increase of about 9.6 percent benefiting 17,545 employees, she added.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS