After the severe impact of the SARS outbreak on the local tourism industry earlier this year, this week's Taipei International Travel Fair (台北國際旅展) is being seen as a great opportunity to further boost business, the organizer of the show said yesterday.
"The annual travel fair is a platform for the industry to lure customers," said Kitty Wong (
Taipei International Travel Fair has been the most significant event for the tourism industry since it was held for the first time in 1987. This year's fair has attracted 400 exhibitors from more than 50 countries and regions around the world, exhibiting at 538 booths.
"We have seen more than 73,000 people have visited the fair over the past two days and we expect the total number of visitors for this year to exceed that of last year, which amounted to 85,000," Wong said.
Jeff Chiu (裘以杰), sales supervisor of Promised Land Resort & Lagoon (理想大地渡假飯店), which opened last year in Hualien, said that his company attracted more customers than last year.
"We offered customers a discount package priced at NT$3,500, which originally cost NT$7,150, for a 16-ping room with a double bed for two. We have sold more than 600 packages worth NT$2.1 million, which went beyond our initial expectations," Chiu said.
Japan remains the country with the largest presence, with 54 booths presented in the fair. Tsugio Kurumisawa, deputy director of the Japan Tourism Association's Tourism Development Department, said they expected to lure more Taiwanese visitors to Japan.
However, one visitor felt the show was not international enough. Wu Ming-fen (
"I hope the organizer can attract more participating organizations from European and American countries for customers like me," said Wu.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day