Swire Coca-Cola Taiwan Ltd yes-terday signed a preliminary agreement with the Ten Ren Tea Co (
The agreement calls for Coca-Cola to manage manufacturing and sales while Ten Ren will supply the raw materials and its trademark, starting this summer.
The oolong and green tea drinks will be packaged in 500cc bottles to appeal to the younger generation.
Recent market growth has been in green tea, which is one reason the companies chose the flavor, said Chuang Yuan-ming (
An industry watcher said the instant-tea market is still lucrative even though its market share already commands 34.6 percent of all beverage sales.
In the period from March last year until February, tea-beverage sales domestically topped NT$1.58 trillion, with green tea accounting for the lion's share of that amount at 32 percent, up from 29 percent in the previous year, Desmond Wang (王道恆), communication manager of ACNielsen Taiwan, said yesterday.
Although oolong tea accounts for 11 percent of all sales, profit from the mountain tea grew 19 percent compared with the same period last year, making it a competitive product, Wang said.
Hung Shih-ming (洪士民), public affairs manager at market leader Uni-President Enterprises Corp (統一企業), says it's not worried about the competition.
"We'd like to see them join the battle, since they will also provide an impetus for us to improve our products and marketing strategies," Hung said.
Swire Coca-Cola Taiwan and Ten Ren Tea are already looking beyond the domestic market.
"If the market share of our product reaches a certain level, we want to expand the products to other places in Asia such as China, Hong Kong and Singa-pore," said William Hsu (許偉倫), external affairs manager at Coca-Cola Taiwan.
"We call the collaboration a marriage of quality tea and excellent marketing," he said.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
RSS