Once the most famous sightseeing spot in Taiwan, the observatory on top of the nation's third highest building, the Shin Kong Tower, will close down at the end of the year after posting losses over the past two years, a company official said yesterday.
The 12-year lease contract for the observatory, located on the 46th floor, or 200m up in the tower opposite the Taipei Main Station, will expire on Dec. 31.
Wu Chuan-chuan (吳娟娟), general manager of the Shin Kong Observatory, said the business started getting in the red two years ago and has posted losses of NT$6 million (US$179,100) this year alone.
"It's the best sightseeing spot. Perhaps people have forgotten about it, and perhaps we haven't done enough marketing and advertising," Wu said.
Opened in 1994, the observatory once drew over 6,000 people a day at its peak, but traffic has drastically declined to only 100 tourists on weekdays or more than 200 on weekends.
Shin Kong Tower's halo has been snatched by the much higher Taipei 101 Observatory, located on the 89th floor of the Taipei 101 building at a height of 382.2m.
Taipei 101 has become the new favorite with traffic surging to 5,000 to 8,000 people on holidays, said Michael Liu (劉家豪), assistant vice president of Taipei Financial Center Corp (台北金融大樓公司), manager of the skyscraper.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, surpassing the US$600 billion mark for the first time, the central bank said yesterday. Last month, the country’s foreign exchange reserves rose US$5.51 billion from a month earlier to reach US$602.94 billion due to an increase in returns from the central bank’s portfolio management, the movement of other foreign currencies in the portfolio against the US dollar and the bank’s efforts to smooth the volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民)said a rate cut cycle launched by the US Federal Reserve
Handset camera lens maker Largan Precision Co (大立光) on Sunday reported a 6.71 percent year-on-year decline in revenue for the third quarter, despite revenue last month hitting the highest level in 11 months. Third-quarter revenue was NT$17.68 billion (US$581.2 million), compared with NT$18.95 billion a year earlier, the company said in a statement. The figure was in line with Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co’s (元大投顧) forecast of NT$17.9 billion, but missed the market consensus estimate of NT$18.97 billion. The third-quarter revenue was a 51.44 percent increase from NT$11.67 billion in the second quarter, as the quarter is usually the peak
Nvidia Corp’s major server production partner Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) reported 10.99 percent year-on-year growth in quarterly sales, signaling healthy demand for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. Revenue totaled NT$2.06 trillion (US$67.72 billion) in the last quarter, in line with analysts’ projections, a company statement said. On a quarterly basis, revenue was up 14.47 percent. Hon Hai’s businesses cover four primary product segments: cloud and networking, smart consumer electronics, computing, and components and other products. Last quarter, “cloud and networking products delivered strong growth, components and other products demonstrated significant growth, while smart consumer electronics and computing products slightly declined,” compared with the
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
RSS