Day: November 19, 2025

Which companies do people most like working for in Asia-Pacific? The FT and Statista surveyed 50,000 employees to find out. Plus: Japan looks overseas; chipmakers’ talent shortage; India reskills workers; Korean banks’ perks; driver automation threat; China’s vulnerable factory gig labourers Financial Times

In a factory complex in Noida, an industrial hub outside New Delhi, Vinod Sharma, the managing director of an Indian electronic component maker, is trying to improve the skills of a small part of India’s vast but poorly trained workforce. “We teach people from zero,” says Sharma at Deki Electronics, which supplies capacitors to an array of industries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Even day-to-day life in the workplace has to be taught, he says. “We have to go to the extent of teaching them how to walk…

When a young Siberian engineer met the love of his life in a “small chat dedicated to Japanese poetry”, the decision to move to Tokyo became inevitable. Gleb Cherdantsev quickly found a job in 2024 with Rakuten, a large Japanese technology conglomerate with interests from ecommerce to mobile. It was the perfect place for an ambitious, foreign-born engineer to land. “I began studying Japanese casually, exactly because I wanted to eventually become able to read Japanese literature and poems. However my language proficiency has never been enough to seriously consider…

MJ Song, a South Korean working mother with a four-year-old son, considers herself lucky because she has been able to work for one company for more than 15 years without her career being hindered by starting a family. Her employer, a unit of Shinhan Financial Group, offers generous pay and benefits such as baby bonuses, childcare allowances and flexible working, allowing her to balance work and family life in a country notorious for long working hours and rigid corporate cultures. Song took two years of maternity leave after her son…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Bankers have long been the ones that took home Asia’s biggest bonuses. Now, an unlikely group is catching up: chip engineers. But unlike bankers, whose rewards tend to rise and fall with market cycles, the surge in chip sector pay reflects a structural shift in how the world is valuing technical talent. A pay revolution has unfolded in the chip sector this year. South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix scrapped the…