The annual Computex always brings bumper revenues for five-star hotels and restaurants in the area, and this year, the world's tallest building has also jumped in to take a share.
Although it has no hotel rooms to meet the surging demand for accommodation from overseas buyers, the Taipei 101 skyscraper is renting out its two large ballrooms to serve as exhibitors' VIP lounges.
"Usually companies would have to use hotel rooms for their meeting purposes, where the beds have to be moved away," said Michael Liu (劉家豪), assistant vice president of Taipei Financial Center Corp (台北金融大樓公司), which owns the building, in a telephone interview yesterday.
The building is located close to the three exhibition halls of the Taipei World Trade Center and the Taipei International Convention Center, where the show is held.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), Taiwan's biggest electronic components maker, has rented one of the ballrooms on the fifth floor of the building's adjacent Taipei 101 Mall during the five-day exhibition.
The 140 ping (460m2) banquet room reportedly has a daily rental fee of NT$240,000 (US$7,700).
Taipei 101 is also cooperating with the Taipei Computer Association (
"We've received a strong response for these services. Next year, we'll arrange more preferential packages, strengthen hardware facilities and design a wide array of coupons to integrate dining and shopping in the mall," he said.
Faced with this new competitor, five-star hotels say they are not worried about losing business. Demand always exceeds supply when major exhibitions are held in the area, they said.
According to the Taiwan External Trade and Development Council (TAITRA,
The Grand Hyatt Taipei, the only hotel situated right next to the show venue, said its rooms were fully booked about four months before Computex started.
The average rate for the hotel's rooms surges to NT$14,000 during this period, compared with NT$5,000 to NT$9,000 at normal times, said Tina Chen (陳甦妤), public relations manager at the Grand Hyatt.
"Some customers have booked rooms for next year's Computex," she said.
To better serve their customers, major hotels outside the area offer free shuttle-bus services to and from the exhibition halls every day during the expo.
Far Eastern Plaza Hotel reported an average room rate of over NT$10,000 per night.
The Grand Formosa Regent Taipei, despite being far from the district, also saw average room rates rise to NT$9,000, bringing in more than NT$3 million a day.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained