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.
NEW IDENTITY: Known for its software, India has expanded into hardware, with its semiconductor industry growing from US$38bn in 2023 to US$45bn to US$50bn India on Saturday inaugurated its first semiconductor assembly and test facility, a milestone in the government’s push to reduce dependence on foreign chipmakers and stake a claim in a sector dominated by China. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened US firm Micron Technology Inc’s semiconductor assembly, test and packaging unit in his home state of Gujarat, hailing the “dawn of a new era” for India’s technology ambitions. “When young Indians look back in the future, they will see this decade as the turning point in our tech future,” Modi told the event, which was broadcast on his YouTube channel. The plant would convert
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said the DRAM supply crunch could extend through 2028, as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has led the world’s major memory makers to dramatically reduce production of standard DRAM and allocate a significant portion of their capacity for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. The most severe supply constraints would stretch to the first half of next year due to “very limited” increases in new DRAM capacity worldwide, Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a news briefing. The company plans to increase monthly 12-inch wafer capacity to 20,000 in the first half of 2028 after a
Property transactions in the nation’s six special municipalities plunged last month, as a lengthy Lunar New Year holiday combined with ongoing credit tightening dampened housing market activity, data compiled by local land administration offices released on Monday showed. The six cities recorded a total of 10,480 property transfers last month, down 42.5 percent from January and marking the second-lowest monthly level on record, the data showed. “The sharp drop largely reflected seasonal factors and tighter credit conditions,” Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) deputy research manager Chen Chin-ping (陳金萍) said. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday fell in February this year, reducing
Zimbabwe’s ban on raw lithium exports is forcing Chinese miners to rethink their strategy, speeding up plans to process the metal locally instead of shipping it to China’s vast rechargeable battery industry. The country is Africa’s largest lithium producer and has one of the world’s largest reserves, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS). Zimbabwe already banned the export of lithium ore in 2022 and last year announced it would halt exports of lithium concentrates from January next year. However, on Wednesday it imposed the ban with immediate effect, leaving unclear what the lithium mining sector would do in the
RSS