Taiwan's Hi-Tech Firms Hike Pays to Retain Talents

Amid business upturn, many domestic hi-tech firms have started a round of pay hike from July to avoid talent drain. Chimei-Innolux, for instance, has raised pays ranging 3-15%, the largest pay-hike scale of the company since the global financial tsunami, to prevent talent poaching by mainland Chinese FPD (flat panel display) firms and Taiwanese semiconductor firms.

In addition to Chimei-Innolux, Sino-American Silicon, Sampo, ASE Inc., and Hon Hai Group have also boosted their pays at a scale ranging 3-8%.

Inside sources said that Chi Mei Innolux hiked pays in July ranging 3-15%, or 7-8% on average, with the actual scale depending on individual performance. Backed by Hon Hai Group, the parent firm, Chimei-Innolux carried out the pay hike for the sake of talent retention. AU Optronics already hiked pays in April, averaging 6-7% in scale. Some staffers with extraordinary performance enjoyed double-digit hike.

Last year, Chimei-Innolux and AU Optronics incurred the largest red inks since their establishment, reaching NT$61.263 billion and NT$64.439 billion, respectively. In addition to business upturn, the higher-than-expectation pay hikes are attributed mainly to the consideration of talent retention.

CSOT Corp., a major FPD maker of mainland China, for instance, is actively poaching engineers from Taiwan to meet its urgent need, as the company plans to boost its monthly 8.5-generation capacity to 100,000 glass substrates by the end of this year. AU and Chimei-Innolux become its primary targets for talent poaching.

In order to poach talents, CSOT offered 1-1.5 million yuan of annual pays to lure Taiwanese engineers, four to five times their annual pays of NT$1-1.5 million now.

Meanwhile, due to serious shortage in 28 nm manufacturing capacity, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. has suffered loss of substantial orders from Qualcomm and other clients to United Microelectronics Corp. and Samsung. TSMC, therefore, is stepping up expansion of its capacity, luring quite a number of talents from FPD firms, since front-end manufacturing process of semiconductor and FPD is similar.

source & copyright: CENS