Taipei - Major Taiwan daily China Times plans to lay off nearly half of its 1,200 staff due to financial problems, union and newspaper officials said Wednesday.

"In the face of a widening deficit and streamlining of the newspaper, a large-scale redundancy in terms of people and facilities is inevitable," publisher Chou Sheng-yuan said in an internal letter to staff.

Chou's letter, released by the paper's trade union, said the management had tried very hard in the past year to improve the company's income, but because of the sharp decline in business and advertising in Taiwan, the efforts to increase revenue had failed.

Chou did not say in his letter exactly how many employees would be made redundant, but trade union officials said Chou revealed in a meeting with them that it would be somewhere between 500 and 600.

Newspaper director Lin Sheng-feng confirmed the lay-off plan Wednesday, but said details would be announced in mid-July.

Stiff competition from Hong Kong-invested tabloid publication Apple Daily, a sharp increase in pulp prices, a decline in ads due to the weak economy and convenient access to the internet as well as television news networks were cited as the causes for the losses at the China Times, which was founded in 1950.

The paper closed its sister publication China Times Express in 2005 due to losses.

Union officials said the company had laid off 3,500 employees in the past seven years. (dpa)