Eyeing the strong market potential in downtown Taipei, hypermarket operator RT-Mart (大潤發) opens its 23rd outlet near Zhongxiao Fuxing MRT station today.
The 3,000-ping (9,900m2) store, located on the capital's Bade Road within a few minutes walk from the Breeze Center (微風廣場) and Sunrise Department Store (中興百貨), marks an important step for RT-Mart to develop its city-format outlet to exploit its target customers' strong purchasing power.
"With easy access to public transportation and our sufficient parking space, we're confident that this medium-sized outlet can rake in NT$2 billion (US$60 million) next year," Kaufmann Wei (
The hypermarket offers 600 car-parking spaces and 500 motorcycle spaces for its clients.
Establishing its first outlet in 1996 through the Taiwan-based Ruentex Group (
Asked how the operator deals with high rental costs in downtown area, Wei said they had to push up revenues to keep the rent ratio at between 3 percent and 4 percent of annual sales.
As office workers account for one-third of its target customers, the new outlet offers an exclusive range of stationery items. It has increased the percentage of fresh foodstuffs and cooked food, and decreased the amount of clothes, due to a high concentration of department stores and boutiques in the area.
To meet different market needs, it also provides services from home delivery of flowers and selling lunch boxes and gift boxes, to wireless services and free recharging services for mobile phone users.
"Based on our market survey involving 800 respondents, we've adjusted the product mix and increased some metropolitan services to satisfy our customers," said Kevin Kao (
Jennifer Wang (王琇姿), associate director at ACNielsen Taiwan's retail measurement services, said RT-Mart has obtained a good location to reach numerous customers but it must make sure its business strategies and service packaging can most benefit the majority of consumers.
Taking lunch boxes as an example, Wang said, as the food area is usually located in the back of hypermarket outlets to make room for kitchens, it is doubtful whether office workers would want to go into a spacious store for lunch.
"Perhaps it can develop a B2B (business to business) model to deliver lunch boxes to office buildings and so boost its revenues," she said.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
UNIFYING OPPOSITION: Numerous companies have registered complaints over the potential levies, bringing together rival automakers in voicing their reservations US President Donald Trump is readying plans for industry-specific tariffs to kick in alongside his country-by-country duties in two weeks, ramping up his push to reshape the US’ standing in the global trading system by penalizing purchases from abroad. Administration officials could release details of Trump’s planned 50 percent duty on copper in the days before they are set to take effect on Friday next week, a person familiar with the matter said. That is the same date Trump’s “reciprocal” levies on products from more than 100 nations are slated to begin. Trump on Tuesday said that he is likely to impose tariffs
HELPING HAND: Approving the sale of H20s could give China the edge it needs to capture market share and become the global standard, a US representative said The US President Donald Trump administration’s decision allowing Nvidia Corp to resume shipments of its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China risks bolstering Beijing’s military capabilities and expanding its capacity to compete with the US, the head of the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party said. “The H20, which is a cost-effective and powerful AI inference chip, far surpasses China’s indigenous capability and would therefore provide a substantial increase to China’s AI development,” committee chairman John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said on Friday in a letter to US Secretary of
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) market value closed above US$1 trillion for the first time in Taipei last week, with a raised sales forecast driven by robust artificial intelligence (AI) demand. TSMC saw its Taiwanese shares climb to a record high on Friday, a near 50 percent rise from an April low. That has made it the first Asian stock worth more than US$1 trillion, since PetroChina Co (中國石油天然氣) briefly reached the milestone in 2007. As investors turned calm after their aggressive buying on Friday, amid optimism over the chipmaker’s business outlook, TSMC lost 0.43 percent to close at NT$1,150
RSS