The number of workers on unpaid leave at Hsinchu Science Park has dropped by nearly 60 percent to 40,933 from a high of about 100,000, because of increasing orders and rising capacity utilization rates, administrators said on Sunday.
Miin Wu (吳敏求), chairman of chipmaker science park based Macronix International Co (旺宏電子), told President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) during a visit on Sunday that the firm had begun to reverse its policy of unpaid leave last month and even planned to hire another 150 engineers — 50 for the research and development department and 100 for the manufacturing department.
Macronix president Lu Chih-yuan (盧志遠) said the company’s factory usage was rising fast and may reach full utilization next month.
However, as customers are conservative about placing orders amid the economic downturn, most orders were short-term rush orders, Lu said.
As the outlook for the third quarter was unclear, Macronix would not invest in a 12-inch plant until the third quarter, when the prospects may become better, Lu said.
Yen Tzong-ming (顏宗明), director-general of the Hsinchu Science Park Administration, said many statistical indicators showed significant improvement.
Output value in the science park, for example, reached only NT$91.4 billion (US$2.75 billion) in the first two months of this year but the figure was expected to rise to a combined NT$118.8 billion for March and last month, Yen said.
The number of unemployed workers at the science park had declined month by month this year, Yen said. Some 382 people lost their jobs last month, from 1,956 last December, he said.
Yen said many firms located in the science park were forced to implement unpaid leave, after seeing their capacity utilization rate fall to between 30 percent and 40 percent amid falling orders.
As a result, the number of workers on unpaid leave surged to 14,500 in January from 870 in December, Yen said.
Since last month, firms in the park said they had seen a recovery in new orders received, prompting most of the firms there to increase their capacity utilization to between 70 percent and 80 percent, Yen said.
As of Friday, 813 businesses in Taiwan have asked employees to take unpaid leave, Council of Labor Affairs statistics show.
The figure represented the lowest number since the council began to notify the government of the number of workers on unpaid leave in mid-January.
The number reached a peak of 238,975 on March 3.
“The jobless situation is stabilizing for the time being, with local firms receiving short-term rush orders from the inventory restocking process,” HSBC analyst Christopher Wong wrote in a note.
“We expect the unemployment rate, to be released this Friday, to rise marginally to 5.8 percent,” Wong said.
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