EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空), the nation's second-largest carrier, yesterday unveiled its second aircraft painted with the popular Japanese cartoon character Hello Kitty, in hopes of boosting business on its Japan routes.
The Airbus 330-200 Hello Kitty jet will serve passengers on the Taipei to Nagoya, Osaka and Sendai routes. The jet is making its maiden voyage to Nagoya today.
Like the first Hello Kitty jet, the second one features paintings of the popular character all around the plane. Boarding passes, tableware, lotion bottles, tissues, food and special-edition duty free merchandise all sport the Hello Kitty look.
PHOTO: CHU PEI-HSIUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
"The Hello Kitty jets are fantasy lands for the massive number of Hello Kitty fans," Peter Chen (陳欣德), president of EVA Airways, said during the launching ceremony at the hangar of Evergreen Aviation Technologies Corp (長榮航太).
"This is a crucial marketing strategy to differentiate us from competing airlines operating on the same routes," Chen said.
EVA Airways introduced the first Hello Kitty jet on the same day a year ago, serving travelers on the Taipei-Tokyo and Taipei-Fukuoka routes. Its business, which is calculated in terms of revenue passenger-kilometers (the total number of paying passengers multiplied by the kilometers they have flown), on the two routes has increased by 10 percent on average, EVA Airways' spokesman Nieh Kuo-wei (聶國維) said.
The passenger load factor on the Tokyo and Fukuoka flights is 90 percent to 95 percent in the high season and remains over 80 percent during the low season, Nieh said.
Nieh refused to disclose the cost in making the Hello Kitty jet, such as the royalty paid to Sanrio Co, copyright holder of Japan's most famous cat.
Owing to high fuel costs, EVA Airways posted a loss of NT$845.02 million (US$25.45 million), or NT$0.24 per share, for the first half of the year.
EVA Airways hasn't released its third-quarter financial results.
While oil prices have dropped to around US$60 per barrel, Chen said the recent price fall would hardly cover the loss this year.
EVA Airway's jet fuel prices are calculated by the average oil prices in Singapore a month earlier. Given comparatively high fuel costs and lower surcharges, the carrier has no plan of matching other airlines in lowering the fuel surcharge, he said.
Singapore Airlines announced last week that it was cutting the fuel surcharge for flights booked after last Saturday. The surcharge on Southeast Asian routes was reduced from US$20 to US$18 per sector, routes to North America from US$90 to US$82 and others from US$60 to US$54.
The nation's carriers, however, charge passengers US$15 for short-haul flights and US$39 for long-haul flights, still lower than Singapore Airlines' adjusted rates.
China Airlines Ltd (華航), the nation's largest carrier, said it would follow government regulations in adjusting fuel surcharges, company spokesman Johnson Sun (孫鴻文) said.
According to a fuel surcharge mechanism established by the Civil Aeronautics Administration in September last year, the surcharge can be lowered to US$10 on short-haul flights and US$26 on long-haul flights should the average fuel price go down to US$60 to US$70 per barrel for two consecutive months.
If the average oil price declines to US$50 to US$60 per barrel for two straight months, the surcharge will be cut to US$7.50 and US$19.50, respectively.
WASHINGTON’S INCENTIVES: The CHIPS Act set aside US$39 billion in direct grants to persuade the world’s top semiconductor companies to make chips on US soil The US plans to award more than US$6 billion to Samsung Electronics Co, helping the chipmaker expand beyond a project in Texas it has already announced, people familiar with the matter said. The money from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act would be one of several major awards that the US Department of Commerce is expected to announce in the coming weeks, including a grant of more than US$5 billion to Samsung’s rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), people familiar with the plans said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of the official announcements. The federal funding for
HIGH DEMAND: The firm has strong capabilities of providing key components including liquid cooling technology needed for AI servers, chairman Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday revised its revenue outlook for this year to “significant” growth from a “neutral” view forecast five months ago, due to strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers from cloud service providers. Hon Hai, a major assembler of iPhones that is also known as Foxconn, expects AI server revenues to soar more than 40 percent annually this year, chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) told investors. The robust growth would uplift revenue contribution from AI servers to 40 percent of the company’s overall server revenue this year, from 30 percent last year, Liu said. In the three-year period
LONG HAUL: Largan Energy Materials’ TNO-based lithium-ion batteries are expected to charge in five minutes and last about 20 years, far surpassing conventional technology Largan Precision Co (大立光) has formed a joint venture with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) to produce fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, mobile electronics and electric storage units, the camera lens supplier for Apple Inc’s iPhones said yesterday. Largan Energy Materials Co (萬溢能源材料), established in January, is developing high-energy, fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries using titanium niobium oxide (TNO) anodes, it said. TNO-based batteries can be fully charged in five minutes and have a lifespan of 20 years, a major advantage over the two to four hours of charging time needed for conventional graphite-anode-based batteries, Largan said in a
Taiwan is one of the first countries to benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, but because that is largely down to a single company it also represents a risk, former Google Taiwan managing director Chien Lee-feng (簡立峰) said at an AI forum in Taipei yesterday. Speaking at the forum on how generative AI can generate possibilities for all walks of life, Chien said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) — currently among the world’s 10 most-valuable companies due to continued optimism about AI — ensures Taiwan is one of the economies to benefit most from AI. “This is because AI is