Taipei: On the back of a boom on global financial markets in January amid peak season effects, funds managed by Taiwan's Bureau of Labor Funds reported gains of NT$108.7 billion (US$3.30 billion) in the month, according to data released by the bureau on Monday. That translated into a rate of return of 1.61 percent in January, the bureau's data showed.

According to Focus Taiwan, the bureau said global financial markets benefited from a traditional peak season in January, when the Lunar New Year holiday fell, prompting buyers to build up their inventories ahead of schedule, which boosted manufacturing activity around the world. However, the boom in global financial markets was offset to some extent by the presence of China-based artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek and its low-cost AI model, which raised concerns over AI investments in the future.

The bureau reported that 57.33 percent of the investments by the labor funds were made overseas, and the remaining 42.67 percent were invested domestically in January. The combined value of the funds managed by the bureau, which includes the Labor Pension Fund, the Labor Retirement Fund, the Labor Insurance Fund, the Employment Insurance Fund, and the Arrear Wage Payment Fund, totaled NT$7.13 trillion as of the end of January.

The value of assets in the new Labor Pension Fund, launched in 2015, totaled NT$4.68 trillion at the end of January, the highest of any fund, and its rate of return for the month stood at 1.47 percent. In contrast, the Labor Retirement Fund, which has been in place since 1984, had about NT$1.07 trillion in assets as of the end of January, with a rate of return of 2.30 percent.

Meanwhile, with the new Labor Pension Fund posting almost NT$700 billion in gains in 2024, the highest in the fund's history, the Bureau of Labor Insurance under the Ministry of Labor has allocated the profits to the personal accounts of about 12.92 million participants in the fund, with more than 50 percent pocketing more than NT$20,000 each. About 7.49 million workers, or 58 percent of the total in the labor fund, secured more than NT$20,000 in profits for the 2024 performance of the fund.

In addition, about 4.67 million workers or 36.2 percent of the total number of workers signed up for the fund received more than NT$50,000 in profit from the fund's 2024 gains.