Eyeing the upcoming peak season this month and next, Ford Lio Ho Motor Co (
"We expect a market size of around 100,000 cars in Taiwan between June and July, before Ghost Month," Ford Lio Ho president Jeffrey Shen (
Traditionally, people in Taiwan do not purchase high-price items like cars and houses during Ghost Month, which falls on the seventh month of the lunar calendar, beginning on Aug. 5 this year according to the Gregorian calender. Consequently, auto companies gear up promotional activities ahead of Ghost Month to boost sales.
The estimated sales in the two months alone could make up to 20 percent of Taiwan's overall car market of around 500,000 units this year, up from about 484,000 units last year, Shen said.
Ford Lio Ho yesterday rolled out a special edition of their popular SUV model, the Escape Sahara 2.3 liter, featuring new colors and advanced accessories, with a price tag of NT$879,000 and a limited shipment of 300 units, in an attempt to lure interested SUV buyers.
Ford hopes to market some 3,000 Escape SUVs during the two-month peak season, Ford Lio Ho's SUV brand manager Kevin Liang (
Meanwhile, Yulon Nissan Motor Co (
Yulon Nissan sold 1,372 X-Trail SUVs last month, up from 1,177 units in April, behind Honda Taiwan Co's CR-V, the nation's best-selling SUV with sales of 1,767 units last month, up from 1,487 units the previous month, according to data compiled by the Chinese-language Car News Web site.
Ambitious as Ford Lio Ho is, the company's SUV sales number, however, declined to 1,125 vehicles last month from over 1,300 in April, due to strong competition from its rivals, including the lately revamped Honda CR-V and Hyundai's new SUV Tucson series launched in March, according to the company.
Skyrocketing oil prices have reportedly depressed sales of the Ford Escape by 40 percent in the US, which is a looming concern for the auto vendor.
"We haven't seen any decline in Taiwan's SUV sales so far becasue of rising oil prices," Shen said, adding that sales of recreation vehicles in Taiwan grew by 12,000 units in the first five months of this year compared to last year.
"Yet we will closely monitor how the situation evolves in the future," he said.
To address the issue, Ford Lio Ho plans to introduce hybrid Escape SUVs, priced under NT$2 million per unit, next year, and may also adopt diesel engines for its Focus and Metrostar series in the meantime, Shen said.
The automaker is also planning to locally produce small-size vehicles equipped with 1.3-liter to 1.6-liter engines with cute and fashionable designs, to attract young car buyers in their 20s, the executive said, without giving a timeframe.
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