■ Carrefour opens in Wanhua
Carrefour Taiwan is scheduled to open its 47th store in the nation in western Taipei tomorrow, making it the first hypermarket to serve the capital's oldest area. Due to the difficulty of acquiring land in the area, the store, located on Guilin Road in Wanhua District, is one of the company's smallest outlets, spokesman Allan Tien (田中玉) said yesterday.
Carrefour said it will run 24-hour services in the new outlet. The six Tesco stores it took over in June this year still maintain their round-the-clock operations although nighttime sales do not cover expenses, Tien said.
The hypermarket expects to open one more store this year in Taipei and another six next year.
■ CPC cuts gasoline prices
The Chinese Petroleum Corp (CPC, 中油) announced yesterday it would cut wholesale gasoline prices by NT$0.3 per liter and diesel prices for NT$0.4 per liter. The new rates went into effect at 12am.
The adjusted retail prices for 98-octane unleaded gasoline is NT$28.2, 95-octane unleaded gasoline is NT$26.7, 92-octane unleaded gasoline is NT$26 and top-grade diesel oil is NT$22.7 per liter, CPC said in a statement.
The adjusted range is calculated by using the price change of West Texas Intermediate crude over the past week in New York trade, which was down 2.43 percent from the previous week, CPC said.
■ NT dollar declines
The New Taiwan dollar lost ground against its US counterpart, declining NT$0.029 to a final closing price of NT$32.765 on the Taipei foreign exchange market. Turnover was US$575 million.
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],”
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
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