Yuntung Motors Ltd (
"Even though autos are ... industrial products, purchases are actually very much driven by emotional factors," David Tung (
The vendor is aware that it still has a long way to go to enhance its brand image, and promotion is key, Tung said.
Since baseball has a large fan base in Taiwan, Yuntung is going to invite Kia Motors' professional baseball team, the Kia Tigers, for a friendly match with the Uni-President Lions (
Last year, the distributor's sales doubled to around 5,500 vehicles after it recruited well-known super-model Lin Chih-ling (
"The decision paid off greatly," Tung said.
Tuntung, which hopes to sell 8,000 vehicles this year, plans to expand its marketing expenditures by 20 percent from the over NT$100 million it spent last year.
However, promotion may not be a cure-all.
"The plight facing us is that ... our competitors are mainly locally made vehicles instead of luxury imports," Yuntung's marketing manager Lars Su (
Pricing is therefore a key issue.
Yuntung distributes three models of sport utility vehicles with price tags ranging from over NT$630,000 to NT$1.3 million, and one model of the vendor's best-selling mini passenger car, the Euro Star, priced from NT$399,000.
Consumers in this segment are very price-sensitive, which puts Kia cars at a disadvantage, as they are subject to foreign exchange fluctuations, Su said.
Another advantage for local automakers is local consumers' deep-rooted belief that Korean made vehicles are poorly made.
"To most people, Korean cars are [thought of as] a piece of crap," said Jimmy Chuang (
The fast depreciation of Korean cars compared to Japanese or European vehicles also makes them less-than-ideal purchases, Chuang said.
Acknowledging that the negative image was bad for business, the distributor last April tried to break into the young consumer segment by introducing its Euro Star mini car.
The model, which mainly lured buyers aged below 25 years old, accounted for nearly 50 percent of sales last year, according to the distributor.
"Young people stereotype less," Su said, adding that cultivating younger customers has other benefits.
Those people will upgrade to our higher-end products as time goes by, he said.
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
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
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