A consortium of pawn shops is banking on the development of an e-commerce platform to balance the sector's losses resulting from the booming cash-advance card business, a pawn shop owner said over the weekend in Taipei.
"In order to compensate for the great losses the industry has seen following the popularity of cash-advance cards, we decided to develop the e-commerce mechanism as a channel for auctioning pawned goods that are not redeemed by customers," said Chin Si-lin (秦嗣林), chairman of Taipei City Pawn Association (台北市當鋪公會).
Taiwanese started turning to cash advances as a method of weathering difficult economic times when Cosmos Bank Taiwan (
The cash-advance cards allow cardholders to withdraw small amounts of money from ATMs for commission fees of about 3.5 percent and annual interest up to 18.25 percent, without providing collateral or guarantees, nor paying application fees or annual fees when applying for the card.
As of August, around 3.8 million cash-advance cards were in circulation nationwide, with total outstanding loans amounting to NT$145.2 billion, the Bureau of Monetary Affairs under the Ministry of Finance said last month.
That figure compared to some 3.3 million cash-advance cards in circulation as of June, with total outstanding loans of NT$127.7 billion, the bureau said.
Ever since then, the nation's pawn shop sector has seen business drop around 40 percent annually, which translated into a total loss of around NT$4 billion, according to Wang Chih-chiang (
"Our business was affected when banks started offering the cash-advance service to credit card holders around eight years ago," Wang recalled. "The business has deteriorated since the cash-advance card business boomed more and more over the past two years."
Some 60 out of 2,000 pawn shops in Taiwan have suspended their business over the past two years due to business slump, Wang added.
So far, 274 pawn shop owners in Taipei have agreed to jointly offer an online sales service Web site (www.pawn.org.tw) for the secondhand items, mostly jewelery and automobiles, which they have bought at a discount of the original price, Chin said.
"We offer quality commodities with guarantees for customers. We currently have up to 10,000 articles worth NT$100 million available for sale online," Chin said.
The number of pawned items available for online sale is expected to increase to 50,000 in the next two years, he added.
But organizers of the nation's first pawn shop Web site want to achieve more.
They said they hope the establishment of such an online channel will help consumers understand more about the pawn sector.
"Over the Net, we provide customers with an online-goods evaluation service as a reference for used-goods market prices," Chin said.
"We will appeal for the concept of used-goods recycling to expand customers' sources and attract people to pawn their unwanted articles," Chin said.
Maureen Wu (
Yahoo-Kimo's online auction Web site provides more than 3 million pieces of goods with an annual auction turnover of up to NT$1.2 billion.
But she did point out the importance of personal identification of the vendors at its Web site to protect the buyer from fraudulent transactions.
"We conduct a verification process to check the authenticity of vendors' e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers to make sure they can indeed be contacted by the buyer," Wu said.
"If the ads posted by vendors look unreasonable, like a luxury-brand bag for sale at NT$3,000, we withdraw the ads and block the vendors from conducting auctions on our Web sites," Wu said.
In response, the pawn association said its commodities for online sale came from its member stores, assuring customers that they won't encounter any fraud or buy any fakes or spoils through its Web site.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to