Starlux Airlines, the newest international carrier in Taiwan, said on Tuesday that it will give its employees year-end bonuses equivalent to one month of salaries, compared with two months last year, due to shrinking income.
In the third quarter of the year, Starlux Airlines incurred a loss per share of NT$0.15 (US$0.005), compared with NT $0.25 earnings per share (EPS) over the same period of last year, which the company previously attributed to concerns over a Japanese manga prediction of a deadly earthquake in Japan on July 5 and U.S. tariff policies.
Photo: Tsai Yun-jung, Taipei Times
Including the third quarter losses, Starlux Airlines posted an EPS of NT$0.16 for the first nine months of 2025, down from NT$0.64 a year earlier.
Despite the lower profitability, the airline said it will raise the wages of employees by about 3 percent on average, adding that it will continue to expand the company’s global flight network, improve operations and boost the bottom line, to allow employees to share in company profits.
Currently, Starlux Airlines owns a fleet of 29 aircraft and operates 35 routes. The carrier said it will take delivery of 14 new planes starting from 2026 as part of its long-term expansion.
Meanwhile, industry sources said EVA Airways is likely to give year-end bonuses equivalent to 6.5 months of salaries after it posted an EPS of NT$3.43 in the first nine months of this year.
However, EVA Air, which gave 7 months of salaries as year-end bonuses last year, has not confirmed this year’s figure.
China Airlines, which gave 6.6 months of salaries as year-end bonuses last year, and budget carrier Tigerair Taiwan, which gave 12.8 months, have not finalized this year’s numbers.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS